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Gap analysis
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Software reliability assessments
- Is software a major or visible portion of your product?
- Are late software deliveries costing your company money and/or causing
dissatisfaction with your customers?
- Are software defects a cause of concern with your customers?
- Does software perform functions that can or may impact safety or monetary issues?
- Is a significant amount of a product budget devoted to software development?
- Is software performance critical to equipment functionality?
- Is your software user friendly and fault tolerant?
- Is user error a major problem?
- Do you have limited resources to improve software?
- Do you have limited calendar time to improve software?
There are several options available depending on your budget and availability of
internal resources.
Firstly, you should have an on site initial software reliability
assessment followed by a detailed assessment.
Unlike other assessments, this assessment measures more then process. It measures the product, defects, other software reliability measures and the
organization.
The illustration above shows how the assessment is administered. The assessor
completes each task shown above resulting in a comprehensive vision and roadmap of how to
reduce escaped defects with the smallest cost and time to implement.
Capabilities
More then 90 organizations benchmarked to date including
- Development practices
- Development organization
- Average defects levels vs. development practices
- Probability of late delivery
- Relative cost of reducing defects
Get a real assessment report - this company was trying to avoid a future failed
project.
Pricing
| Service |
Deliverables |
Comments |
| Initial assessment Your site
Followed by
Detailed assessment performed at SoftRel, LLC |
Initial assessment: Report and presentation covering
- measurable goals for moving forward
- current software reliability index (A percentile from 1 to 99
corresponding to escaped defect density)
- predicted defect density at start of testing and delivery
and end of useful life
Detailed assessment:
- Detailed report showing quantitative and qualitative measures for
each of the software lifecycle deliverables (requirements through test
plans)
- A root cause of analysis of recent defects - this is used to identify the appropriate
focus (i.e. requirements, design, code, corrective action, etc.)
- Predicted escaped defects (those that will be visible to customer)
as well as predicted testing defects (those visible after integration)
- Prediction of testing resources required to reach the defined
objective
- Prediction of maintenance resources required to reach the defined
objective
- Relative cost and time increase of addressing identified gaps in survey
- Predicted decrease in defects and defect density of addressing the
gaps in the survey
- Tradeoff scenarios between cost, time and reduced defects
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At least 7 days notice is required for services performed at your site.
See the travel policy for more information |
| Gap analysis performed at SoftRel,
LLC
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- Identification of key gaps that separate your project from getting to the next
percentile
- Identification of key strengths that separate your project from percentiles with bigger
defect density
- Recommendations as applicable for how to execute the key gaps identified
- Checklists
- Helpful tips and hints
- Lessons learned
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You must have an initial and detailed assessment prior to
having a gaps and strengths analysis |
| Software reliability program plan |
See a sample table of contents |
An initial and detailed assessment is recommended but not
required |
| Get benchmarked |
See get benchmarked |
An initial assessment is required. A detailed
assessment is highly recommended. |
| Software reliability prediction |
See Software reliability predictions |
Prerequisites are completion of the initial and detailed
assessment |
Typical schedule for Software Reliability Assessment
| Task |
Resources required from your company |
Approximate time frame |
| Question and answer with subject matter experts |
At least one subject matter expert from these areas:
- Software management
- Software testing/validation
- Software quality/metrics/process engineering
- Engineering management
At least one typical/average software engineer
An experienced software engineer other then those experts listed above who has been
with the company/division for less then 1 year but more then 1 month
The order of the meetings is not important.
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Software manager - 1 hour minimum Software testing/validation - 30-60
minutes
Software quality/metrics/process engineering - 30-60 minutes
Engineering management - 15-30 minutes
Average/experienced software engineers - 30 minutes each |
| Collect defect data |
Collect a sample of fielded and internal defects from the defect database.
Key data includes: a. dates
b. severity
c. description (so that a root cause can be determined)
d. status (fixed, open, rejected, etc.) |
1 hour This task can be performed in between interviews.
Generally, software quality/metrics/processing engineering or software testing expert will
have this data available. So, this task can be combined with the interview with the
appropriate persons. |
| Review software development work in progress |
This incased customer specs, system specs, software specs, software design
documents, software code samples, software test plans, checklists, etc. Someone
in a leadership position who can provide these documents in hard copy or electronic
format. |
SoftRel will review these independently |
| Collect software size and other metrics |
In order to predict escaped defects, a size prediction is necessary.
SoftRel has tools for computing actual size, if your software organization does not
have the size available. Our size tools are "read only". A software
engineer or manager with understanding of the software size or someone who has access to
the software code. |
Usually about 1 hour from a software engineer or software manager |
| Final meeting to present executive summary of results |
You can decide who will attend from your company. |
You can decide how long this presentation will be. Usually about 1
hour is sufficient for presenting the executive summary and then additional time for
Q&A. |
| Off site preparation of detailed results |
SoftRel will prepare a detailed written report of all results remotely and
then deliver to you normally within 1 week |
Not applicable |
| Off site preparation of Gaps and strengths analysis |
SoftRel will prepare a detailed written report of all results remotely and
then deliver to you normally within 1 week |
Not applicable |
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