Improving the ROI of Software Quality Assurance Activities: An Empirical Study

Review, process audit, and testing are three main Quality Assurance activities during the software development life cycle. They complement each other to examine work products for defects and improvement opportunities to the largest extent. Understanding the effort distribution and inter-correlation among them will facilitate software organization project planning, improve the software quality within the budget and schedule and make continuous process improvement. This paper reports some empirical findings of effort distribution pattern of the three types of QA activities from a series of incremental projects in China. The result of the study gives us some implications on how to identify which type of QA activity is insufficient while others might be overdone, how to balance the effort allocation and planning for future projects, how to improve the weak part of each QA activity and finally improve the Return On Investment (ROI) of QA activities and the whole process effectiveness under the specific organization context.