Our next meeting will be held on Tuesday, April 27th at 6:00PM. Please RSVP to news@ssq.org.

Topic

How to Identify, Collect, and Use Defect Metrics

Chris Holl, Director of Quality at DriveCam

Last month Chris shared his experiences in implementing defect management programs from both a cultural and technical perspective. This month’s talk picks up the next steps. Through the process of managing defects, great amounts of data are collected. These defect data provides a wealth of information for project management and process improvement. This talk will present some very specific measures, how to gather and filter the data, compute the metrics, and use the information to make better decisions and monitor processes. Although it would be helpful in context to have attended the March meeting, we’ll start with a brief review so this presentation stands on its own.

Key points include:

• What is a defect? When does it count?
• Information to gather during defect management, and why
• Duration, Severity, Priority, and queue time.
• The Basics: Defect Discovery and Closure
• Review and inspection defects
• Extrapolation with Excel for predicting project completion and latent defects
• More advanced predictive models
• Calculating Defect Density and its use in prediction
• Computing the relative cost of discovery in different lifecycle phases
• Estimating rework for project completion

About Our Speaker

Chris has worked in Quality and process improvement for over 20 years. As Director of Software Best Practices at Intuit, he designed the company’s defect management process in 2002 and guided its evolution for the next five years. He taught classes on Defect Management to improve the value of the system to users, and showed how defect data could provide project management and process improvement insights. He is a past officer of the SSQ and has taught classes on metrics, requirements, and various process improvements. He is an IEEE reviewer and has presented at multiple conferences including SEPG 2008, where he spoke on Phase Containment. Chris is currently the Director of Quality at DriveCam and giving a series of classes at Qualcomm on Requirements Engineering.

Cost:

Members and first-time guests: $8.00, non-members: $15.00.

Location:

CareFusion (C1-A306)
6055 Lusk Blvd
San Diego CA 92121

From Lusk Blvd turn right at first driveway. Turn left at the roundabout. Drive around to the back of the building and park. The conference room is located at the rear of the bldg. and is accessible from the parking lot.

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