Towards a Defect Prevention Based Process Improvement Approach

Abstract

Defect causal analysis (DCA) is a means of product focused software process improvement. A systematic literature review to identify the DCA state of the art has been undertaken. The systematic review gathered unbiased knowledge and evidence and identified opportunities for further investigation. Moreover, some guidance on how to efficiently implement DCA in software organizations could be elaborated. This paper describes the initial concept of the DBPI (Defect Based Process Improvement) approach. It represents a DCA based approach for process improvement, designed considering the results of the systematic review and the obtained guidance. Its main contributions are tailoring support for DCA based process improvement and addressing an identified opportunity for further investigation by integrating organizational learning mechanisms regarding cause-effect relations into the conduct of DCA.