Customer Reviews

The Economics of Software Quality

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In this book, authors Capers Jones and Olivier Bonsignour quantify the factors that influence software quality and provide information for people to gain insight into how their projects might compare to others. The measurements in this book are based on thousands of software projects.

One of my frequent complaints about the software industry is that we just don't measure very many things. However, thankfully there are people like Jones and Bonsignour that do have a rich source of metrics from enough projects that we can learn from them.

Capers Jones has long been considered the source for software quality metrics. To me, Capers is the "numbers guy" of our profession. With over 40 years in the field, Jones has a wealth of information he has maintained and published over many years.

Olivier Bonsignour is responsible for Research & Development and Product Management in a continual effort to build the world's most advanced Application Intelligence technology. Prior to joining CAST, Mr. Bonsignour was the CIO for DGA, the advanced research division of the French Ministry of Defense.

For example, the authors state that "high quality levels are invariable associated with shorter-than-average development schedules and lower-than-average development costs." This finding is based on over 13,000 projects between 1973 and today.

The authors maintain that the real economic value of high quality software is not the cost to fix defects, but rather:

* the reduced likelihood of canceled projects

* the reduced risk of litigation

* shortened development schedules

* lower development costs

* reduced warranty costs

* increased customer satisfaction

This book addresses:

* What is software quality and how do we define its value?

* How can we estimate and measure software quality?

* How can software defects be prevented?

* How can we find and remove defects before testing?

* What are effective ways to test software and measure its effectiveness?

* What is the current state of post-delivery software defects?

* How do projects of various characteristics (low, average and high-quality) compare?

* How can technical debt be addressed from a business value perspective?

You will find a multitude of data from projects in a variety of industries, at various levels of quality, and at various levels of practice maturity. You will see by the numbers which project approaches work and which ones don't work very well.

By reading this book, you will gain insight not only into the current state of software quality, but you will also learn about measurement and metrics of software. These are critical things for any software quality professional to learn. In fact, after reading this book, you will know more about software measurement than 95% (that's my estimate) of testers and QA professionals.

I highly recommend this book, not only as a guide for software quality efforts, but also a benchmark for your own efforts.

Capers Jones and Olivier Bonsignour have authored a very useful book that will help the software industry make more objective decisions and improve the economic outcomes of software delivery organizations. This book is loaded with data, benchmarks and cause-and-effect relationships for reasoning about how to improve software quality. It is not an easy read because it goes both deep and broad across the diverse contexts of software domains and across the life-cycle practices of software development. This book is a great place to start when looking for credible and objective benchmark data to build a business case or defend a proposal for improving software quality or productivity.

The economics of software quality is an attractive topic all by itself. However, the book delivers unexpected value on two other fronts. First, the presentation and discussion of substantial data provides an educational framework for quantitative reasoning with enlightening discussions on cause and effect as well as cautions on potential misinterpretation. Second, the well-integrated history lessons throughout give the reader a good feel for the improvement trends, or lack of improvement trends, across the software industry.

Decades of experience, compiled into an encyclopedia of facts and figures. Well worth the price.