Austin Logistics Inc : assessing defect density

Austin Logistics Inc. Solutions provides tools that help centralize resource management, optimize and maintain compliance of calling schedules for consumer financial service organization (banks, financial institutions). With the increasing number of customers, the amount of rework and availability of resources had been notably decreasing over time; thereby negatively affecting the overall cost and quality of the software being delivered. The improvement objectives of the company and its departments were broadly stated but lacking a goal-driven nature. The software measurement Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach was chosen and used for this research initiative to better support business driven quality improvement. Software defect density data was collected and analyzed to identify significant deviations in the software development life cycle.. The results of the initial analysis on the transformed defect-tracking data helped identify the negatively affected areas within the software development life cycle. The data showed significant variations in the requirements, design and implementation phases of the product life cycle, thus helping identify various process improvement opportunities. On quantifying the change in defect density, the effectiveness of using GQM has also provided valuable insights for process improvement. Based on these results, we were able to identify some of the weaknesses and shortcomings in our application development process.