Improved Technique for Measuring the Number of Defects in Automotive Agile SW Development : Defect debt trend

We present in this article an improved technique for measuring the number of open defects for Automotive SW development using Agile methodology. Ideally in Agile SW development, major or customer visible defects, which can affect the usage of the system at the end user, should not be integrated into the product delivered to the customer. But especially in Automotive SW development we need to have a mechanism for defects handling and tracking to closure. We made an analogy with the Waterfall paradigm where the number of solved defects was tracked. We hereby present the benefits of the method for measuring the number of open defects in Agile SW Development using the Defect Debt Trend metric. The acquired advantages are demonstrated by a detailed example of a real automotive SW development project.