Serge Demeyer: Agile Quality Assurance

Software is vital to our society and consequently the software engineering community is investigating means to produce reliable software. For a long, long time, reliable software was seen as software “without bugs”. Today however, reliable software has come to mean “easy to adapt” because of the constant pressure to change. As a consequence, organisations producing software must seek for a delicate balance between two opposing forces: striving for reliability and striving for agility. In the former, organisations optimise for perfection; in the latter they optimise for development speed.

This talk will will investigate ways to reduce the tension between reliability and agility by exploiting so-called software configuration management systems. Today these systems are used rather passively: they monitor the past and present activities, but are seldom used to predict what is likely to happen in the future. Yet with all the data in these systems it becomes feasible to answer questions like: which modules are likely to be affected by a given change request? where should we focus our regression test activities ? how severe is a given problem report ? who is the best person the handle a given bug report?