Defect Detection Effectiveness and Product Quality in Global Software Development

Global software development (GSD) has become a common practice in the software development industry. The main challenge organizations have to overcome is to minimize the effect of organizational diversity on the effectiveness of their GSD collaboration. The objective of this study is to understand the differences in the defect detection effectiveness among different organizations involved into the same GSD project, and how these differences, if any, are reflected on the delivered product quality. The case study is undertaken in a GSD project at Ericsson corporation involving nine organizations that are commonly developing a software product for telecommunication exchanges. Comparing the effectiveness of defect detection on the sample of 216 software units developed by nine organizations, it turns out that there is statistically significant difference between defect detection effectiveness among organizations. Moreover, the defect density serves better as a measure of defect detection effectiveness than as a measure of the product quality.

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