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Training Plan
This document describes a plan for a training session designed to teach people the “round-robin” technical review process. (…)

Good requirements are essential for successfully executing projects

Improperly understood or documented requirements, can inevitably lead to:

– Cost escalations

– Late delivery i.e. (…)

Procedural Approach to Quality Management

– Defects are detected by performing reviews or testing
§ Reviews are structured, human-oriented processes
§ Testing is the process of executing software (or parts of it) in an attempt to identify defects

– In the procedural approach for quality management, procedures and guidelines for the review and testing activities are established

Procedural Approach to Quality Management

– The execution of the activities identifies defects, which are later removed

– For example, the system testing procedure generally involves making a test plan that lists all test cases that should be executed during testing, getting the plan reviewed, and then executing the plan

Procedural Approach to Quality Management

– The procedural approach to defect removal does not allow claims to be made about the percentage of defects removed or the quality of the software following the procedure’s completion

– Merely executing a set of procedures does not provide a basis for judging the effectiveness of the defect removal procedures or assessing the quality of the final code

Procedural Approach to Quality Management

For example, if the test planning is done carefully and the plan is thoroughly reviewed, the quality of the software after performing the testing will be better than if testing was done but the test plan was not carefully thought out and the review was done perfunctorily

Introduction

Quality along with cost and schedule, is a major factor in determining the success of a project

In practice, however, quality management often revolves around defects

Hence we use delivered defect density—that is, the number of defects per unit size in the delivered software

This definition is currently the de facto industry standards

But what is a Defect? (…)

Introduction

In any organization, past experience plays a key role in improvement and management

Any good organization or manager will learn from the past experience

How effectively past experience can be used for improvement and process management depends on how well this experience is captured and organized to enable learning

For software projects, the process database (PDB) and process capability baseline (PCB) are two mechanisms for encapsulating past experience for use in project planning and management

Information from PDB and PCB is used heavily during project planning but they are not part of project planning phase

Instead, they provide key inputs for planning and, in a sense, form the infrastructure for project planning

The main source of data for the two components is the completed projects

The data collected in the projects is analyzed and then reported in closure reports, which form the main source for PDB

The data in the PDB are then used to compute the PCB

Process Database

It is a permanent repository of process performance data from projects, which can be used for project planning, estimation, analysis of productivity and quality, and other purposes

Each project providing one data record for PDB

The following are the key purposes of the PDB

– To aid a new project in planning, particularly in the estimation of effort and defects

– To collect productivity and quality data on different types of projects

– To aid in creating process capability baselines

– To facilitate data analysis for identifying areas and scope of improvement

What information does a new project need about past projects that can be used in planning? (…)

Assessment Objectives:

To learn how the organization works

To identify its major problems

To enroll its opinion leaders in the change process

Problems or Solutions

Management is often so focused on finding solutions that it fails to define the problems. (…)