Fault Slip Through measurement in software development process

The pressure to improve software development process is not new, but in today´s competitive environment there is even greater emphasis on delivering a better service at lower cost. In market-driven development where time-to-market is of crucial importance, software development companies seek improvements that can decrease the lead-time and improve the delivery precision. One way to achieve this is by analyzing the test process since rework commonly accounts for more than half of the development time. A large reason for high rework costs is fault slippage from earlier phases where they are cheaper to find and remove. As an input to improvements, this article introduces a measure that can quantify this relationship. That is, a measure called faults-slip-through, which determines the faults that would have been more cost-effective to find in an earlier phase.