วันศุกร์ที่ 26 ธันวาคม พ.ศ. 2551

Using Six Sigma To Minimize Software Bugs

By Craig Calvin

Software is a set of programs developed using various programming languages. The software programs may be developed for the purpose of reservation of air tickets, calculation of various bills, accounting processes and so on. Sometimes software has some drawbacks or it may not have a certain functionality that is expected of it to work perfectly. These are usually bugs in software and they need to be fixed. But a better solution is to avoid such errors in the beginning of the software development stages, so that there are minimal errors. This is precisely what Six Sigma methodology enables companies to do.

If we consider any software program, such as a hotel reservation system, there would be utilities in it such as calculations for multiple guests during different seasons and so on. If for example, there is an incorrect calculation of the room rate, or there is a missing database link that causes updates made to another part of the database not to be reflected in the data, it may lead to miscalculation of rates for some guests.

There are generally two types of software bugs - programming bugs and data bugs. The data bugs are usually easier to discover, isolate and fix, as they are usually the product of incorrect table rate errors. Programming bugs are the logical errors made and detecting their source is more difficult, requiring modification and recompilation of the code before it is used again.

The nature of Six Sigma is its control mechanism at every stage of product development. Various controls can be employed for mistake proofing. For instance, if there were normal minimums for rates or costs or charges, then any value below that minimum would be an error. Six Sigma systematically helps to eliminate bugs in this way.

There are specific areas where information can be studied and analyzed during the software development process. Because Six Sigma is by its nature, data driven, it is useful in this regard. During the data collection period, the programmer can be assured that the data is as correct as it possibly can be. Later during development, any areas that crop up as potentially troubling can be mistake proofed using the earlier collected date. Using Six Sigma as a debugging tool in this way is helpful in minimizing losses brought on by unforeseen software bugs.

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