Contemporary Trends in Defect Prevention: A Survey Report <s> INTRODUCTION <s> Defect causal analysis (DCA) is a means of product focused software process improvement. A systematic literature review to identify the DCA state of the art has been undertaken. The systematic review gathered unbiased knowledge and evidence and identified opportunities for further investigation. Moreover, some guidance on how to efficiently implement DCA in software organizations could be elaborated. This paper describes the initial concept of the DBPI (Defect Based Process Improvement) approach. It represents a DCA based approach for process improvement, designed considering the results of the systematic review and the obtained guidance. Its main contributions are tailoring support for DCA based process improvement and addressing an identified opportunity for further investigation by integrating organizational learning mechanisms regarding cause-effect relations into the conduct of DCA. <s> BIB001 </s> Contemporary Trends in Defect Prevention: A Survey Report <s> INTRODUCTION <s> With the increase of the software complexity, the defect measurement becomes a task of high priority. We give a new software defect analytical methodology based on orthogonal classification. This method has two folds. Then a set of orthogonal defect classification (ODC) reference model is given which includes activity, trigger, severity, origin, content and type of defect. In the end, it gives a support tool and concrete workflow of defect tracing. In contrast with the traditional method, this method not only has the advantages of popularity, haleness and low cost, but also improves the accuracy of identifying defects notably. Thus it offers a strong support for the prevention of defects in software products. <s> BIB002 </s> Contemporary Trends in Defect Prevention: A Survey Report <s> INTRODUCTION <s> This paper describes a test application development tool designed with a high degree of defect prevention and detection built-in. While this tool is specific to a particular tester, the PT3800, the approach that it uses may be employed for other ATE. The PT3800 tester is the successor of a more than 20 year-old tester, the PT3300. The development of the PT3800 provided an opportunity to improve the test application development experience. The result was the creation of a test application development tool known as the PT3800 AM creation, revision and archiving tool, or PACRAT (AM refers to automated media, specifically test application source code). This paper details the built-in defect prevention and detection techniques employed by PACRAT. <s> BIB003 </s> Contemporary Trends in Defect Prevention: A Survey Report <s> INTRODUCTION <s> "Learning from the past" to make systems more efficient in terms of cost and time is the hallmark of any engineering discipline. Prevention of defects is the "holy grail" of "learning's from the past" i.e. every product generation we learn from our defects and prevent it from recurring in the next generation. Taking this philosophy further "capturing defects in the earlier stage of the life cycle" is a means of preventing defects in the later stages of the product life cycle. Correction of defects is costly and the cost increases exponentially with every subsequent stage. This also impacts the cycle-time directly. Defect prevention then not only helps in cost reduction but also helps in cutting down the development time. When we talk of software development, we are talking of hundreds of defects (in-process as well as post release). It would be very inefficient and time-consuming to have preventive action planning for each of them, as most of them could be symptoms of some common root cause. If we have to handle software defects of such large magnitude the best way then would be to classify them into patterns and then do root cause analysis on those patterns. There are number of methodologies available in the industry to do this classification and IBM's ODC (Orthogonal defect classification) is one such methodology. The methodology classifies each defect into orthogonal (mutually exclusive) attributes some technical and some managerial. These attributes provide all the information to be able to sift through the enormous volume of data and arrive at patterns on which root-cause analysis can be done. This coupled with good action planning and tracking can achieve high degree of defect reduction and cross learning. The questions always then are -- can methodologies be really applied to do software defect prevention in a structured way? How can an abstract defect classification mechanism really help to identify patterns? How does one measure the effectiveness of such actions? Who should do these activities? How does all this fit into the existing process framework? This paper is an attempt to answer these questions by sharing the experiences of using the IBM-ODC methodology in a case study of real-life software development project (DVD player product). The motivation of this paper is not to discuss the ODC methodology itself but rather to demonstrate through a case study, the structured process for defect prevention using some attributes of ODC for defect classification and its related interpretations for causal analysis, action planning and results tracking. The fitments of the scheme into the bigger picture of defect prevention, cross learning and mapping to elements of the SEI-CMMI framework are some of the highlights of this paper. The paper concludes with a summary of learning's and some points to ponder. <s> BIB004 </s> Contemporary Trends in Defect Prevention: A Survey Report <s> INTRODUCTION <s> Defect prevention is the most vital but habitually neglected facet of software quality assurance in any project. If functional at all stages of software development, it can condense the time, overheads and wherewithal entailed to engineer a high quality product. The key challenge of an IT industry is to engineer a software product with minimum post deployment defects. This effort is an analysis based on data obtained for five selected projects from leading software companies of varying software production competence. The main aim of this paper is to provide information on various methods and practices supporting defect detection and prevention leading to thriving software generation. The defect prevention technique unearths 99% of defects. Inspection is found to be an essential technique in generating ideal software generation in factories through enhanced methodologies of abetted and unaided inspection schedules. On an average 13 % to 15% of inspection and 25% 30% of testing out of whole project effort time is required for 99% 99.75% of defect elimination. A comparison of the end results for the five selected projects between the companies is also brought about throwing light on the possibility of a particular company to position itself with an appropriate complementary ratio of inspection testing. Keywords—Defect Detection and Prevention, Inspections, Software Engineering, Software Process, Testing. <s> BIB005 </s> Contemporary Trends in Defect Prevention: A Survey Report <s> INTRODUCTION <s> "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." In software, these expressions translate into the common observation that the longer a defect stays in process, the more expensive it is to fix [10]. Moreover software defects are expensive and time consuming. The cost of finding and correcting defects represents one of the most expensive software development activities. And that too, if the errors get carried away till the final acceptance testing stage of the project life cycle, then the project is at a greater risk in terms of its Time and Cost factors. A small amount of effort spent on quality assurance will see good amount of cost savings in terms of detecting and eliminating the defects. To gain a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of the software process, it is essential to examine the details of defects detected in the past projects and to study how the same can be eliminated due to process improvements and newer methodologies. This paper will focus on finding the total number of defects that has occurred in the software development process for five similar projects and aims at classifying various defects using first level of Orthogonal Defect Classification (ODC), finding root causes of the defects and use the learning of the projects as preventive ideas. The paper also showcases on how the preventive ideas are implemented in a new set of projects resulting in the reduction of the number of similar defects. <s> BIB006
Defect prevention is a quality assurance alternative for improving quality of software product. The focus of defect prevention techniques is to produce better quality products within the available budget and time. Quality of a product directly relates to the number of defectsminimal defects lead to achieve better quality. Most of the software projects fail to meet the desired level of user acceptance and standard of quality as they do not adequately employ effective defect prevention strategies. Defect prevention techniques by and large are applied in many fields during production and development phases, however this study confines to the subject of software defect prevention. Defect prevention is normally performed at every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). The major activities related to software defect prevention include: creating software defect prevention plan, defect inspection, defect causal analysis, defect classification, defect prioritization and defect detection. Suma and Nair BIB005 consider that defect pertains to any inaccuracy or blemish in the software product or process. Generally, the term defect refers to an error, bug, fault or failure  . The terms error, fault and failure can further be elaborated as 'action that thrust to incorrect result', 'erroneous decision taken due to wrong interpretation of the available information' and 'lack of ability to meet the expected performance' respectively. Defect prevention techniques aim at prohibiting defects to occur beforehand  . Alternatively, defect prevention can be defined as a quality improvement process by identifying defects through root causes analysis and formulating effective corrective and preventive measures to inhibit these defects from recurring in future BIB005 BIB006 . Similarly, casual analysis is used for Root Cause Analysis (RCA) BIB001  which is the prime technique for identification of risks associated with distinctive types of defects. Orthogonal Defects Classification (ODC), devised by IBM, is a commonly used technique for unearthing and classifying defects in the software products  BIB004 BIB002 . Bean BIB003 recommends PACRAT (Performance and Continuous Re-Commissioning Analysis Tool) for creation, revision and archiving during defect prevention process. Due to diversified nature of the software products, there is no perfect and ideal solution to preclude defects. This paper is organized into four sections. This section being the first section provides a brief introduction of the defect prevention and its classification. The second section summarizes the related work along with a critical analysis of the techniques described in the literature review. The perspective future work and conclusion are described in the third and fourth sections respectively.