Identifying Defect Injection Risks from Analysis and Design Diagrams: An Industrial Case Study at Sony

Identifying the origins of potentially injected defects in implementation activities during requirement analysis and design activities is challenging, but leads to the prevention of defects, which are burdensome to correct. This study investigates whether such defect injection risks can be generalized and defined by risk occurrence conditions of the objects in the existing analysis and design diagrams and whether the defined defect injection risks are applicable to other analysis and design diagrams. Specifically, we identify defect categories, which are injected after analysis and design activities and subsequently detected during system testing of commercial products developed at Sony. Then, regarding the defect categories as the exposed defect injection risks, we define defect injection risks with the objects defined in the analysis and design diagrams of the products. Each defect injection risk consists of risk description, diagram type, and occurrence conditions of objects in the diagrams. Afterwards, we evaluate whether the defined defect injection risks appear in the analysis and design diagrams of three different products under development and five publicly available analysis and design diagrams. The results showed that three defect injection risks were defined and that the two risks appear in the analysis and design diagrams of the three products and the remaining one appears in the analysis and design diagrams of two products. The results also showed that one defect injection risk is present in all five publicly available analysis and design diagrams, and two risks appear in four of the diagrams. The three defect injection risks are general enough to identify risks in analysis and design diagrams from other domains. Developers can be more cautious about the risks and prevent defect injections with the defect injection risks.