Driving Product Quality towards Release Goals

摘要

The software quality assurance activities strive to achieve utmost product quality at release given the scope, schedule, and resources. Normally, a program management team, comprising of all stakeholders, establishes a release criteria that functions as a measuring stick for the product quality at release. At a minimum, the release criteria includes test execution and defect goals from the quality perspective. This paper describes a set of metrics that a software quality assurance group can provide to the program management team to assess the product quality and make release decisions. The author divides the quality activities during the product development into two phases; "New Functionality" testing and "Regression" testing and discusses test coverage such as total test cases planned, percentage of planned test cases executed and defect characteristics; such as number of defects by severity and their trends in each phase. As one would expect the defect find rate is a function of multiple factors including testing phase, test effectiveness, execution rate, and product complexity. Tracking each factor provides insight into on-going product quality and therefore an understanding of progress towards release. The author applies the concept of "code volatility" to further validate the defect characteristics. The trends in defect behaviors are explained with regards to the influencing factors highlighted above.