Improving the ROI of software quality assurance activities: an empirical study

  • Authors:

  • Qi Li;Fengdi Shu;Barry Boehm;Qing Wang

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA;Laboratory for Internet Software Technologies, Institute of Software, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA;Laboratory for Internet Software Technologies, Institute of Software, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

  • Venue:
  • ICSP'10 Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on New modeling concepts for today's software processes: software process
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Review, process audit, and testing are three main Quality Assurance activities during the 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 intercorrelation 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 activities from a series 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, how to balance the effort allocation and planning for future projects, how to improve the weak part of each QA activity and finally improve the Return On Investment (ROI) of QA activities and the whole process effectiveness under the specific organization context.