The Economics of Software Quality

Poor quality continues to bedevil large-scale development projects, but few software leaders and practitioners know how to measure quality, select quality best practices, or cost-justify their usage. In The Economics of Software Quality, leading software quality experts Capers Jones and Olivier Bonsignour show how to systematically measure the economic impact of quality and how to use this information to deliver far more business value.

Using empirical data from hundreds of software organizations, Jones and Bonsignour show how integrated inspection, structural quality measurement, static analysis, and testing can achieve defect removal rates exceeding 95 percent. They offer innovative guidance for predicting and measuring defects and quality; choosing defect prevention, pre-test defect removal, and testing methods; and optimizing post-release defect reporting and repair.

This book will help you

• Move beyond functional quality to quantify non-functional and structural quality
• Prove that improved software quality translates into strongly positive ROI and greatly reduced TCO
• Drive better results from current investments in Quality Assurance and Testing
• Use quality improvement techniques to stay on schedule and on budget
• Avoid “hazardous” metrics that lead to poor decisions

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Defining Software Quality and Economic Value
Chapter 2: Estimating and Measuring Software Quality
Chapter 3: Software Defect Prevention
Chapter 4: Pretest Defect Removal
Chapter 5: Software Testing
Chapter 6: Post-Release Defect Removal
Chapter 7: Analyzing the Economics of Software Quality