A large-scale survey on the effects of selected development practices on software correctness

Releasing software with required quality is important for software producers in order to be successful. Therefore, understanding which development practices affect software quality has always been of high interest. However, little empirical evidence has been reported on this matter. The research presented in this paper aims at analyzing the effects of nine pre-selected development practices on the quality aspect correctness of software releases. To this end we collected data from software developers worldwide, using an online survey. 1006 valid responses were received and analyzed with the help of statistical methods. We found that four of the nine development practices show statistically significant effects on the correctness of released software, namely solving technical debt, test coverage, code reviews, and monitoring and fixing software quality problems. Our results indicate that using development practices specifically focusing on improving software quality shows a positive effect on the level of correctness of released software. Development practices that are more organizational in nature didn’t show similarly clear effects.