Using Defect Data to Make Real Quality Improvements

A large development organization was challenged to decrease production defects by at least 70 percent. Without extra money or time to install major process changes, what should be done? For a baseline, there was a production defect database that had been running at a steady state for over a year, but no way to size the many different projects and no appetite for either function points or measuring lines of code. In this interesting case study, Betsy Radley reports how they used approximations and sometimes crude assumptions to develop measurements from the defect data. These measurements identified applications that had the fewest product defects. Find out how they used that information to look for processes and tools used in these "good" applications and then applied them to the "bad" applications. That process, along with an open mind and a measured approach to the many "reasons" for defects, had the magical effect they were looking for, all done with very little money and no new resources. Come and see if you can experience the same results in your organization.

• Measures of defects in production systems drive process improvement
• A low-cost approach to significantly reduce production defects
• Raise the quality level of all the project teams with an enterprise approach