Defect Prevention: A General Framework and Its Application

Defect prevention in CMM and causal analysis and resolution in CMMI are focused on identifying the root cause of defects and preventing defects from recurring. Actions are expected at a project level as well as organization level. This paper provides a general framework of defect prevention activities which consists of organization structure, defect definition, defect prevention process and quality culture establishment. Implementation of defect prevention results in rapid and sustained improvement in software product quality which is evident from an example in Neusoft Group, where defect density in post release phase decreased from 0.85 defects/KLOC in 2000 to 0.1 defects/KLOC in 2005