Using ODC to diagnose an Agile enterprise application development project

Abstract

This paper presents a case study using Orthogonal Defect Classification (ODC) as a diagnostic tool to understand the quality and productivity issues in a Agile enterprise web development project. The project spanned a little over two years and had an effort in the range of 100,000 hours. The use of Agile was new to this engineering team. However, the senior people in the team had several years of experience with different process models. The project used a Scrum development model and ran three week Sprints. The objective of the ODC analysis was to understand the dynamics of the development as it actually occurred - as opposed to what was on paper or believed to have been implemented. We also wanted to understand the quality of the product produced, its stability and causes of customer pain. The development process had a separate Quality Assurance (QA) function, and a development led test and inspection effort. We wanted to understand their individual effectiveness, and how the structure effected production level quality. This case study was conducted by the senior engineering team along with ODC expertise from our firm. A subset of the application (around 4 major components) were chosen for this study. This allowed for an examination of component level issues, versus systemic issues across the entire application.