Software QA FYI - SQAFYI

Factors Affecting Personal Software Quality

By: Mark C. Paulk

Understanding the factors that influence software quality is crucial to the continuing maturation of the software industry. An improved understanding of software quality drivers will help software engineers and managers make more informed decisions in controlling and improving the software process. Data from the Personal Software Processprovides insight into interpersonal differences between competent professionals as increasingly disciplined processes are adopted. Program size, (empirically measured) programmer ability, and disciplined processes significantly affect software quality. Factors frequently used as surrogates for programmer ability, e.g., years of experience, and technology, e.g., programming language, do not significantly impact software quality, although they may affect other important software attributes such as productivity. An understanding of these factors may help managers implement practices that support high-quality software.

The research reported in this article was part of a larger investigation into the relationship between process discipline and software quality [1]. It focuses on the product, technology, and programmer ability factors that may affect software quality in addition to the process factors. My research confirms that a disciplined process affects software quality. It also confirms that programmer ability affects software quality and, more importantly, shows that even top performers can improve their performance by a factor of about 2X by following disciplined processes. Commonly used surrogates for ability such as seniority and academic credentials are, however, likely to be ineffective measures.

The research uses data from the Personal Software Process (PSP), which applies process discipline to the work of the individual software professional in a classroom setting. PSP is taught as a one-semester university course at several universities or as a multi-week industry training course. It typically involves 10 programming assignments, using increasingly sophisticated processes [2]. The life-cycle processes for PSP are planning, designing, coding, compiling, testing, and a post-mortem activity for learning. The primary development processes are designing and coding, since there is no requirements analysis step.

When discussing quality in the software industry, defects are the common indicator, although software quality characteristics include functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency, maintainability, and portability. Although other aspects of quality are important, software quality is measured as defect density in testing in the analyses described in this article.

Potential explanatory variables identified in prior research can be divided into categories related to the product and application domain, the technologies used, the software engineering processes followed, and the ability of the individuals doing the work. Quality issues related to the customer requirements are outside the scope of this research. Although requirements volatility is a significant quality concern in software projects, requirements volatility is not an issue for PSP.

Many explanatory factors for software quality from models such as COQUALMO [3] are out of scope for this research because they address project and team issues that are not relevant to the PSP environment. This highlights the challenges in generalizing PSP results to software work in general, but factors important for individual performance should also be important for teams, projects, and organizations.

There are four PSP major processes – PSP0 to PSP3 – with minor variants for the first three (PSP3 can also be considered a minor extension of PSP2). Each level builds on the prior level by adding a few engineering or management activities. This minimizes the impact of process change on the engineer, who needs only to adapt the new techniques into an existing baseline of practices. Design and code reviews are introduced in assignment No. 7. Design and code reviews are personal reviews conducted by an engineer on his or her own design or code. They are intended to help engineers achieve 100 percent yield: All defects are removed before compiling the program. Design templates are introduced in assignment No. 9. The design templates are for functional specifications, state specifications, logic specifications, and operational scenarios.

PSP students are asked to measure and record three basic types of data: time (effort), defects, and size (lines of code [LOC]). All other PSP measures are derived from these three basic measures.

Data analyzed in this research included the data used in the Hayes and Over study [4], as well as additional data collected through 2001. These rich data sets allow sophisticated statistical analyses ranging from simple regression models to multiple regression models to mixed models that incorporate random effects and repeated measures. The conclusions reported are based on consistent results for multiple data sets. The data sets are usually split by assignment 9A or 10A (to remove potential differences in problem complexity and ensure a relatively mature process) and by programming language (to remove technology differences), both including and excluding outliers. A data set could therefore be described as (9A, C, No Outliers). In some cases, e.g., when investigating the impact of programming language used, different data splits are used as appropriate.

Confirming PSP Quality Trends
Process maturity is a generic concept that can be considered low for PSP0 and high for PSP3. It is interesting to note that in COQUALMO, process maturity has the highest impact of all factors on defect injection. As can be observed in Figure 1, which shows the differences in defect density in testing for each PSP major process, the software quality trend across the PSP’s major processes is apparent, confirming prior analyses.

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Factors Affecting Personal Software Quality