Master Thesis Defense - February 17, 2015: A DMAIC Framework for Improving Software Quality in Organizations: Case Study at RK Company

Racha Karout

Tuesday, February 17, 2015 at 2:00
Room EV003.309

You are invited to attend the following M.A.Sc. (Quality Systems Engineering) thesis examination.

Examining Committee

Dr. A. Youssef, Chair
Dr. A. Awasthi, Supervisor
Dr. A. Ben Hamza, CIISE Examiner
Dr. A. Bulgak, External Examiner (MIE)

Abstract

Managing quality is a vital aspect in software development world, especially in the current business competition for fast delivery of feature rich products with high quality. For an organization to meet its intended level of excellence in order to ensure its success, a culture of quality should be built where every individual is responsible of quality and not just the software testing team. However, delivering software products with very few bugs is a challenging constraint that is usually sacrificed in order for a company to meet other management constraints such as cost, scope and scheduling.

The purpose of this thesis is to apply six sigma DMAIC framework on 'RK’ company (name anonymized) in order to help software organizations focus on improving the quality of their software products. Different phases of DMAIC methodology are applied to one of the largest software applications for ‘RK’ company where critical to quality aspects were identified, production bugs were classified and measured, the causes of the large number of production bugs were specified leading to different improvement suggestions. Several metrics were proposed to help ‘RK’ company control its software development process to ensure the success of the project under study.