Improving quality, one process change at a time

We report on one organization´s experience making process changes in a suite of projects. The changes were motivated by clients´ requests for better time estimates, better quality, better stability and more reliable test scheduling resulting from the high number of bug reports and constant delivery delays. The teams embarked on a series of top-down process changes inspired by the IBM Rational Unified Process. Changes included adopting the Rational Tools, introducing iterative development, and later the hiring of a formal manual testing team and support for refactoring activities. To assess the impact of these changes we have collected fault data from 23 releases of the systems including releases from before and after these changes were introduced. In this report we discuss the challenges and impact of these process changes, and how the development teams leveraged these successes to gradually introduce other process improvements in a bottom-up fashion.