Using In-Process Testing Metrics to Estimate Post-Release Field Quality

In industrial practice, information on the software field quality of a product is available too late in the software lifecycle to guide affordable corrective action. An important step towards remediation of this problem lies in the ability to provide an early estimation of post-release field quality. This paper presents a suite of nine static in-process unit test metrics, the Software Testing and Reliability Early Warning for Java (STREW-J) metric suite. The STREW-J metrics can be used to leverage the software testing effort to predict post-release field quality early and throughout the software development phases. The metric suite is applicable for software products implemented in Java for which an extensive suite of automated unit test cases are incrementally created as development proceeds. We built and validated a prediction model using the STREW-J metrics via a three-phase case study approach which progressively involved 22 small-scale academic projects, 27 medium-sized open sour...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISSRE
• Authors: Nachiappan Nagappan, Laurie Williams, Mladen A. Vouk, Jason Osborne
• Keywords: Field Quality, ISSRE 2007, Metric Suite, Post-release Field Quality, Software Engineering