Defect type and its impact on the growth curve

Abstract

The authors present an empirical investigation on possible cause and effect relationships between defects and the software development process. The authors use defect data from an operating systems development project and find that initialization defects are strongly related to the inflection noticed in the reliability growth. The defect type distribution identified process problems that concurred with the developer's hindsight. Thus, it is shown that it is plausible that there exist other cause-effect relationships that could be identified. This finding could pave the way for a more systematic process control methodology to be applied to software development.