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Defect Reduction
Empirical Research Activities
A major theme of the President’s Information Technology
Advisory Committee (PITAC) report was the “fragility”
of our software infrastructure, where fragility means “unreliability,
lack of security, performance lapses, errors, and difficulty in
upgrading” [PITAC98]. The PITAC was particularly concerned
by these failings because software now affects almost every aspect
of personal and professional life in the nation, and even greater
demands on software are expected in the future as people increasingly
rely on it in their everyday lives.
Defect reduction activities help construct higher-quality,
more reliable systems by concentrating on finding and repairing
defects in software artifacts during the development process.
Data
suggests that ideally, defects should be removed as early in the
software lifecycle as possible (for example, in the requirements
and design phases) when they are the cheapest to correct.
CeBASE offers
resources on:
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Defect Reduction Lessons learned
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eWorkshops: Panels
of experts discuss heuristics concerning defects in software development.
Click
here
to know more about the eWorkshops.
§
Results of the workshop on "What We Know about Fighting
Defects," that was held June 7, co-located with the
2002 Metrics Symposium in Ottawa ,
Canada. The goal of the workshop was to generate a list of
heuristics on software reduction that reflect what experts feel to
be the current state of knowledge in this area. A summary of the
resulting discussion is available HERE.
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Results
of Third
eWorkshop – Nov. 12, 2001
– Focusing on effective methods for finding
defects
§
Results of Second
eWorkshop – July 16,2001 – Focusing on the impact of
defects on software
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Results of First
eWorkshop - March 16,2001 – Focusing on the cost and effort due
to software defects
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Read a white
paper describing the research work. (Coming soon.)
o
Software
Defect Reduction Top 10-List
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Defect reduction techniques
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Reading Techniques to Improve Software Inspections
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Reading techniques provide step-by-step procedures to guide
individual inspectors when they review a software artifact. Unlike
many other inspection approaches, which refine the meeting roles
and responsibilities, reading techniques focus on providing guidance
for the individual, “preparation” phase of the inspection
– where inspectors need to effectively review the given
artifact and recognize defects.
§
For CeBASE collaborators only: Browse the searchable repository
of data collected on reading techniques and associated artifacts.
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Defect prediction
techniques
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COQUALMO
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COQUALMO is a model for estimating delivered defect density.
CeBASE is working
to expand the decision-support available to practitioners through
research activities in conjunction with:
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The NSF/CNPq “Readers’ Project”
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To address issues of running effective replications and drawing
general and robust lessons learned, a cooperation between Brazilian
and American researchers, named "Readers: A Collaborative Research to Develop, Validate and Package Reading Techniques
for Software Defect Detection,” was initiated
in 1999. This cooperation, supported by the Brazilian (CNPq) and
American (NSF) national science agencies, has the general purpose
of investigating techniques for analyzing software documents in
diverse cultural settings. The long-term objective in this research
line is to tailor these “analysis techniques” to accomplish
a specific software-related task (defect detection) using specific
kinds of software document (requirements, specification, and code
documents) in specific environments or cultural settings (Brazilian
and American industries and academia) based on empirical evaluation.
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The ISERN Distributed Inspection Experiment
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ISERN, the International Software Engineering Research Network,
was founded in 1992 to promote the state of the art of empirical
software engineering in research and practice. A current research
thrust is the development of a method to plan, conduct, and analyze
concerted families of experiments. Data from such studies can
be combined easily and without loss of accuracy to provide higher-level
lessons learned about the practical use of some technology. The
goal of the method is to maximize the quality and benefit of the
individual studies as part of the family and to minimize the effort
for researchers by reusing experiment knowledge.
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