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Support planning and controlling of early quality assurance by combining expert judgment and defect data—a case study

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Abstract

Planning quality assurance (QA) activities in a systematic way and controlling their execution are challenging tasks for companies that develop software or software-intensive systems. Both require estimation capabilities regarding the effectiveness of the applied QA techniques and the defect content of the checked artifacts. Existing approaches for these purposes need extensive measurement data from historical projects. Due to the fact that many companies do not collect enough data for applying these approaches (especially for the early project lifecycle), they typically base their QA planning and controlling solely on expert opinion. This article presents a hybrid method combining commonly available measurement data and context-specific expert knowledge. To evaluate the method’s applicability and usefulness, we conducted a case study in the context of independent verification and validation activities for critical software in the space domain. A hybrid defect content and effectiveness model was developed for the software requirements analysis phase and evaluated with available legacy data. One major result is that the hybrid model provides improved estimation accuracy when compared to applicable models based solely on data. The mean magnitude of relative error (MMRE) determined by cross-validation is 29.6% compared to 76.5% obtained by the most accurate data-based model.

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Acknowledgment

We would like to thank the development project staff and the IV&V staff from the JAXA Engineering Digital Innovation Center (JEDI) at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), where we conducted the case study to construct the hybrid prediction model. We would like to thank the staff of JAMSS, who greatly contributed by answering the questionnaires and giving us historical experience data. Finally, we would like to thank Adam Trendowicz and Marcus Ciolkowski from Fraunhofer IESE for the initial review of the paper, Sonnhild Namingha for proofreading, and the anonymous reviewers of the International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering and the Journal of Empirical Software Engineering for their valuable feedback. Parts of this work have been funded by the BMBF SE2006 project TestBalance (grant 01 IS F08 D).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Fraunhofer-Platz 1, 67663, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Michael Kläs, Frank Elberzhager & Jürgen Münch

  2. Safety & Product Assurance Department, Japan Manned Space Systems Corporation, Urban Square Tsuchiura, 1-1-26, Kawaguchi, Tsuchiura, Ibaraki, 300-0033, Japan

    Haruka Nakao

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  1. Michael Kläs
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  2. Haruka Nakao
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  3. Frank Elberzhager
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  4. Jürgen Münch
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael Kläs.

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Editor: Laurie Williams

Appendix

Appendix

Table A1 Major Categories of defect injection and detection factors collected by Jacobs et al. (2007)
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Table A2 Defect introduction drivers used in COQUALMO model (Huang and Boehm 2005)
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Kläs, M., Nakao, H., Elberzhager, F. et al. Support planning and controlling of early quality assurance by combining expert judgment and defect data—a case study. Empir Software Eng 15, 423–454 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-009-9112-1

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