Further considerations about this linear equation would be: First,
under the extreme condition that E_Re% and E_PA% are both
equal to 0, which means the organization doesn’t have any
activities related to review and process audit, we could see that
the testing would take up as high as 73% of the total effort to
satisfy the required quality goal. This percentage of testing is far
beyond the benchmark from industry at the same level of quality
which implies that the bad effort allocation leads to a huge waste
of resources and effort. Second, if the coefficient of E_Re% or
E_PA% stands in the range from -1 to 0, which means if you add
1% more effort to review or process audit, it will save less than
1% testing effort, so the ROI of adding more effort on review or
process audit will be negative. In such cases, you should
reconsider about reducing the effort put on review and process
audit, and put more on testing. In sum, this equation gives quality
managers some insights about how to balance the effort put on
testing, process audit, and review based on history project data.
Defines standard
Replaced/Superseded by document(s)
Cancelled by
Amended by
| File | MIME type | Size (KB) | Language | Download | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| usc-csse-2009-513.pdf | application/pdf | 476.77 KB | English | DOWNLOAD! |
Provides definitions
Abstract
Review, process audit, and testing are three main Quality
Assurances activities during software development life cycle.
They complement each other to examine work products for
defects and improvement opportunities to the largest extent.
Understanding the effort distribution and inter-correlation among
them will facilitate software organization project planning,
improve the software quality within the budget and schedule and
make continuous process improvement. This paper reports some
empirical findings of effort distribution pattern of the three types
of QA from a serial of incremental projects in China. The result of
the study gives us some implications on how to identify which
type of QA activity is insufficient while others might be
overdone, and how to balance the effort allocation and planning
for future projects, improve the weak part of QA activities and
finally improve the whole process effectiveness under the specific
organization context.