AVISTA News: Process Control Article

February 7, 2012 - The latest issue of CrossTalk Magazine, the Journal of Software Defense Engineering, includes an article from AVISTA services process improvement experts Craig Hale and Mike Rowe. The article, “Don’t Get Out of Control: Achieving Real-Time Quality and Performance,” covers the basics of statistical process control (SPC), and the benefits for software development quality.

SPC is a technique for monitoring real-time process performance. Using control charts, organizations can plot key process parameters against historical standards. For example, software organizations can analyze defects per 1000 lines of source code (KSLOC).

Teams can monitor processes for unusual events. If an event is having negative consequences, then identifying and removing the root cause before too much damage has occurred should result in less rework. Likewise, if something is having a positive effect on a project, then the team may want change the process to continue the positive impacts.

While it takes time and effort to deploy and manage SPC, it can yield valuable benefits. If your team is considering SPC, here are a few things you’ll need to do:

Standardize. Institutionalize software processes, so results from historical projects can be generalized to future projects.
Track. Create strong data collection systems that do not burden engineers with record keeping. Sometimes you can make an engineer’s job easier with these systems.
Understand. Know your business well. This is critical to finding which key parameters are most useful to track to help optimize the business and processes.
Observe. Study outliers to discover how and why their processes are producing them—this goes for both undesirable and desirable events.
Update. Nothing stays the same. It is important to update the organizational control charts as processes and technologies evolve.

Read the complete article online at: www.crosstalkonline.org/storage/issue-archives/2012/201201/201201-0-Issue.pdf

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