The goal of software inspections and tests is to reduce the expected cost of software failure over the life of a product. This paper extends the use of defect triggers, the events which cause defects to be discovered, to help evaluate the effectiveness of inspection and test activities. In the case of inspections, the defect trigger is defined as a set of values which associate the skills of the inspector with the discovered defect. Similarly, for tests, the defect trigger values embody the various strategies being used in creating test scenarios. The usefulness of triggers in evaluating the effectiveness of software inspections and tests is demonstrated by evaluating the inspection and test activities of some software products. These evaluations are used to point to both deficiencies in inspection and test strategies, and progress made in improving such strategies.>

We present a case study of the use of a software process improvement method which is based on the analysis of defect data. The first step of the method is the classification of software defects using attributes which relate defects to specific process activities. Such classification captures the semantics of the defects in a fashion which is useful for process correction. The second step utilizes a machine-assisted approach to data exploration which allows a project team to discover such knowledge from defect data as is useful for process correction. We show that such analysis of defect data can readily lead a project team to improve their process during development.>

The goal of software inspection and test is to reduce the expected cost of software failure over the life of a product. The authors extend the use of defect triggers, the events that cause defects to be discovered, to help evaluate the effectiveness of inspections and test scenarios. In the case of inspections, the defect trigger is defined as a set of values that associate the skills of the inspector with the discovered defect. Similarly, for test scenarios, the defect trigger values embody the deferring strategies being used in creating these scenarios. The usefulness of triggers in evaluating the effectiveness of software inspections and tests is demonstrated by evaluating the inspection and test activities of some software products. These evaluations are used to point to deficiencies in inspection and test strategies, and to progress made in improving such strategies. The trigger distribution of the entire inspection or test series may then be used to highlight areas for further investigation, with the aim of improving the design, implementation, and test processes.>

Orthogonal defect classification (ODC), a concept that enables in-process feedback to software developers by extracting signatures on the development process from defects, is described. The ideas are evolved from an earlier finding that demonstrates the use of semantic information from defects to extract cause-effect relationships in the development process. This finding is leveraged to develop a systematic framework for building measurement and analysis methods. The authors define ODC and discuss the necessary and sufficient conditions required to provide feedback to a developer; illustrate the use of the defect type distribution to measure the progress of a product through a process; illustrate the use of the defect trigger distribution to evaluate the effectiveness and eventually the completeness of verification processes such as inspection or testing; provides sample results from pilot projects using ODC; and open the doors to a wide variety of analysis techniques for providing effective and fast feedback based on the concepts of ODC.>

An integrated approach to developing the control software for efficient and dependable manufacturing systems is presented. The formal model of a manufacturing system is used in planning the sequence of operations of each class of jobs to be manufactured by this system. To achieve efficiency, the reservation table technique is used to create optimum cyclic job-shop schedules for processing a batch of jobs. To achieve dependability, a plan-oriented fault detection and correction strategy is proposed.>

The use of the reservation table technique to create optimal cyclic schedules is explored. A detailed discussion and analyses are presented of the properties that determine the theoretical maximum initiation rate, the set of all possible initiation strategies, efficient strategies that yield the maximum realizable performance, and the methods for adding delay to a reservation table so that its maximum realizable rate achieves the theoretical maximum rate. These methods inherently allow multiple devices to be reserved concurrently. They can deal with transport time explicitly. They achieve higher initiation rates by including cycles that involve multiple job initiations. The optimizations are fully valid, not heuristic. These scheduling algorithms can be coupled with the planning environment reported by J.K. Chaar and R.A. Volz (1989). The integrated planning/scheduling framework forms a major component of a software engineering environment that the authors are currently developing.>