Software Process Improvement
at the
Open Software Foundation
The Open Software Foundation is an industry consortium with the mission
to develop portable open-system software offerings.
OSF is responsible for Motif, the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE),
and OSF/1 - an industry standard open operating system.
OSF/1 is a large, complex software product, consisting of over 2 million
lines of source code. In developing and maintaining OSF/1, we faced a series
of problems, including:
- a need for rapid product release cycles
- major computer vendors had critical dependencies on OSF/1 technologies.
- a need for improved product quality and reliability.
- a need for increased productivity from a smaller group of software
engineers.
- a requirement to reduce our defect backlog by an order of magnitude.
[from over 1000 unfixed bugs down to ~100].
The engineering team met these challenges by using TQM methods, including:
- cross-functional teams to examine the software development process
and identify improvements; [critical to the success of this was making
the engineers responsible for defining the necessary process changes]
- establishing easy-to-measure, relevant metrics to provide insight into
our product and processes. [Both defect metrics and performance metrics
were established]
- using root-cause analysis to identify common problems.
Implementing the basic improvements led to measurable benefits, including:
- Reduce the basic build-test-release cycle from one month down to one
week!
- Reduce the defect backlog by a factor of 10, while reducing the effort
necessary to fix and document each bug-fix.
- Increased the MTBF from ~10 hours under stress to greater than 160
hours under heavy load.
- Delivered two major product upgrades with increasing quality and functionality
while undergoing greater than 25% reduction in staffing for each release.
- Establishing predictable schedules - product release dates scheduled
at 12-15 month intervals were met +- two weeks!
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