Case Study: Project Management Using Cross Project Software Reliability Growth Model

We propose a method to compare software products developed by the same company in the same domain. Our method, which measures the time series of the number of detected faults, employs software reliability growth models (SRGMs). SRGMs describe the relations between faults and the time necessary to detect them. Although several researchers have studied cross project defect predictions to determine defect locations using the features of previous software product's code such as lines of codes and complexities, past works on SRGMs did not compare products or develop comparison methods. Herein we propose a method to compare SRGMs across products. To provide managers and developers insight on advances of its products, our method is applied to the datasets for nine projects developed by Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd. SRGMs based on person hours are between 13% and 97% more precise than those based on calendar time.