Process diagnostics

Process monitoring and its close scrutiny is the only mechanism to keep the process under statistical control, thereby ensuring product quality. The most optimum and cost effective tools to accomplish this mission in industry are charting the process and studying trends. This can maintain the health of the process, which has a direct bearing on product quality. This paper considers the application of control charts for software processes and other appropriate tools that could be used to understand process trends specifically in the case of software projects where the number of data points is small. Case studies for the application of different tools to quantitative process management and software quality management are illustrated in the paper.