A statistical method for controlling software defect detection process

The quest for solutions to stay competitive in the marketplace brings software industries to take steps to control their products and processes by introducing metrics as part of their quality system and setting triggers for action when their capability limits are exceeded. Institutionalized software inspection and testing, together with previews and postmortems within each phase of the software development life cycle have been widely recognized as a solid foundation for defect prevention. However, there still lacks a systematic control mechanism for these defect detection activities. In this paper, a statistical method is proposed to control the software defect detection process together with further defect prevention analysis. This method is currently being piloted in the Motorola Singapore Software Centre.