Resource/schedule/content model: Improving testing effectiveness

At Cisco, our primary measure of field reliability is Software Defects Per Million Hours (SWDPMH), and this metric is goaled on a yearly basis for over 120 product families. A key reason SWDPMH is considered to be of critical importance is that we see high correlation between SWDPMH and Software Customer Satisfaction (SW CSAT) over the wide spectrum of products and feature releases. Therefore, it is important to try to anticipate SWDPMH for new releases before the software is released to customers. Toward this end, we have developed a model predictive of SWDPMH, called the Universal Release Criteria (URC) Model. One use of the URC model is to help with planning subsequent releases, and another use is in helping to plan for remediation of a release that is under test but underperforming during the test cycle.