ODC - Orthogonal Defect Classification

Implementing ODC

The cost impact on an individual software engineer during the development process is minimal. Typically, measured in the order of a dozen keystrokes per defect to fill out one or two panels. The incremental time is probably negligible once one enters a tracking system to track the defect. We have measured anywhere from less than a minute up to four minutes depending on the tracking system. There is an initial setup cost which involves education, tool changes, and process changes to get ODC started. Currently some of our education classes run a total of 3 hours which include a lab session. To provide a workable framework within the development lab, a process needs to be defined for the analysis and feedback of the data with owners responsible for the activities. Depending on the degree of deployment within a lab, we have the ODC ownership completely within a development team in the case of a few projects, or under a process manager when used for the whole lab.

One of the natural extensions of ODC is to assist the Defect Prevention Process (DPP) [6]. DPP identifies the root cause of defects and creates action that prevent the re-occurrence of such defects. ODC data provides a fertile environment where analysis can identify hot-spots and report situations without human analysis of each defect. Essentially, ODC provides a very low-cost method to bring issues to the table and rank order them in terms of impact. Furthermore, ODC is not limited by human attention span in looking at several problems or across several databases to make inferences. Thus, ODC can be used to focus DPP and the DPP process can be leveraged by devoting time to the hot-spots and not laboring over reams of data.