Improving the quality of the products produced by the SRDP Program requires a integrative approach, and while NRAO has a long history of producing high quality products we don't often talk about it. This page is the beginning of a process to monitor and improve the quality of software products. A more detailed description of the Quality management is available in the TTA Software QA plan.
As a starting point we adopt the following objective function for Software Quality:
Where Quality (Q) is defined as the fraction of completed features (FC) to the scheduled features (FS) minus the Defects found in production (DP) and any Technical Debt incurred (TD). I know that this equation has unit problems, but it is intended as conceptual.
The Feature completion rate can be deduced from the subsystem planning and Jira records, and a process for recording technical debt has been developed by Mark Whitehead here. This page will describe the process for determining the defect rate in production (and related quantities) and how the information is intended to be used.
Defects
Features and defects are tracked through the Jira system and provides a natural mechanism for harvesting data for our quality metrics. An additional field will be available on all tickets in the SSA Project: Detection Environment. This field has the following valid entries: