Process Complexity Based on Concurrent Tasks for Software Development

Abstract

In software development projects, large gaps between planned development process and actual development exist. For example, the process of the requirement repeated definition by the demand of a sudden customer in the design process. We call the added process a fragment process. Although complicated development processes may influence product quality, conventional researches did not clarify relationships between process quality and product quality. Therefore, we propose a metric of process complexity focusing on concurrent processes in order to clarify relationships between process quality and product quality. Process complexity is a value that can quantitatively measure modifications of an original development process. In 8 industrial projects, we investigated relationships between values of the process complexities and product qualities. As a result, correlation coefficient between process complexities and important failure is 0.786. In addition, we show a case study of process complexity in order to predict post-release product quality.