ODC Deep-Dives for Rapid Holistic Product Development Insight

Ram Chillarege, 2010

Appears in ISSRE 2010, International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, November 2010, San Jose, CA.

Abstract --

A holistic insight into a product development history and customer consequences is possible via ODC retrospectives, provided the sample space is carefully chosen and the data integrated with related process measurements. This case study and method illustrates how to achieve this insight.

-- Body contents to be updated after the ISSRE Conference --

Summary

  • 1. This paper introduces the notion of ODC Deep Dives that provide a significant insight into the nature of defects faced by a product and their corresponding impact on the customer.
  • 2. One of the important advantages of the ODC Deep Dive is that it can be conducted with minimal impact on the development organization. While it is skill intensive and needs experience with analysis methods, it relieves the organization of a long training cycle and data collection process to get insight in cases where speed is essential.
  • 3. The retrospective analysis also allows one to draw into the analysis larger spans of time, thereby being able to evaluate changes in the organization and the processes.
  • 4. Key to the holistic analysis is to tie customer issues with the traditional software engineering development process issues thereby gaining significant insight.
  • 5. Following this approach, one also need not rely on additional consulting resources from marketing to build the customer picture.
  • 6. The selective drill down that ODC provides allows one to examine specific software engineering practices and evaluate their effectiveness.
  • 7. The data from the exercise gives us a baseline for the product that can be used to examine the effectiveness of the process in future releases.
  • 8. Develops recommendations for immediate use, and long term strategy. Given the baseline created by the analysis it allows one to evaluate the impact of the process changes and new practices that are introduced.

    • We have used the ODC Deep Dive in numerous client engagements, and have also developed a formal method to execute them. While the details far exceed the limited space in a technical paper, we have tried to illustrated the overall concept and benefit here. Further details on the methods can be obtained from the information line at info (a) chillarege dot com