Master Thesis ‘Empirical Investigation of the Effect of V&V and Agile Software Development on Software Quality Improvement using a Pilot Study’

Project managers recognize that difficult-to-use processes in software development hamper their teams in fulfilling the needed tasks within the planned time. Often the resulting output does not meet the customers needs. On the other hand the business requirements of customers change rapidly and all involved stake-holders should respond by adapting the project goals.

Thus they are looking for processes which are more light-weight so they are able to react in shorter time for changed needs. Furthermore project managers want to produce high-quality software with the smallest possible effort to obtain the most profit.

In this thesis we introduce a package of verification and validation (V&V) techniques in combination with agile processes and show how they work and which problems could be solved by them. We focus on different methods for defect findings relating on different artifacts in different phases of software development. We introduce a technique that is called Usage-based Implementing (UBI) which is based on PairProgramming. Furthermore we replicate the method Usage-based Testing (UBT) which is conducted as desk-testing (UBT-i). Usage-based Reading (UBR) is a well known technique that we use to set Usage-based Testing and Usage-based Implementing in relation which each other.

The results of our pilot study show that a combination of UBI and UBT-i or UBR in an agile process, which we introduce as the Agile Inspection and Implementation Process (AΠP), is a good approach to produce reliable software and to support project teams with errorless artifacts so costs do not exceed expectation.