Defectivity profiling with dynamic COQUALMO: An explication and product quality retrospective

SUMMARY A software development organization's process trustworthiness can be enhanced through development project retrospectives or postmortems, which seek to produce lessons from mistakes and successes in the project performance. Tool support for such retrospectives is usually limited to qualitative analysis. A new model, Dynamic COQUALMO, offers quantitative support through a defectivity profile that can be calibrated to a project's actual profile of defects found over time. The model inputs can then be varied to represent alternative project decisions and conditions, providing a basis for estimating the effects of project improvements on product quality. This paper describes Dynamic COQUALMO and demonstrates its use in a project retrospective. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.