Difficulties in Establishing a Defect Management Process: A Case Study

A well-organized defect management process is one of the success factors for implementing software projects in time and in budget. The defect management process includes defect prevention, defect discovery and resolution, defect causal analysis, and the process improvement. However, establishing an organization-wide defect management process is a complicated task. The main research question in this paper is what kind of difficulties organizations have regarding the defect management process. Our findings show that problems are related to defect resolution reports, limited project resources for fixing defects, and challenges in creating a test environment. Results are based on our observations from four case organizations. The main contribution of this study is to help organizations to identify and avoid typical problems with defect management.