Automated quality tracking

The development of computer-aided software engineering tools, with their undoubted advantages, needs to be parallelled by developments in automated quality measurement and tracking tools. The authors describe an initial approach taken by them in this respect: providing an automated method of tracking the progress of functional verification testing against a defect removal model (DRM). The automated tracking package described, comprises the following general elements: a controlling routine which inputs data from a driver plan file and a PTR summary file and computes plotting information which it passes to a graphical display routine for plotting; subsidiary routines to extract a raw PTR summary from the database for the product being tracked; subsidiary routines to refine this summary into, in the example given, a list of FV PTRs; a flat file driver plan; and files giving the chart format and data definition files which the graphical display manager uses to plot the chart.<>