The primary goal of a software project team would be to meet the strict delivery schedules within the resource and budgetary constraints without compromising on the quality of deliverables. Thus the defects reported by Quality Control and other teams become vital. On one side, it is important that Quality control and other teams identify as many defects as possible, fixing those defects within a timeline suitable for product launch timelines is crucial on other side. Fixing the defects becomes more and more complex as variants of products & versions of software increase. This blog explains some ways of handling this situation in such complex system.

In projects that involve several teams (which may be globally distributed) the team reporting defects may not be in a position to identify owners for all the issues. In such projects, project management constitutes team which is generally called system engineering or triaging team. The primary goal of this team is to tackle the defects reported in the project with the overall objective to reduce the defect turnaround time. This system engineering team will become efficient if the members have overall system knowledge.

The role of a system engineer can be anything from identification of the module owner till even fixing the defect. Considering the fact that there will be multiple devices & multiple versions of software to be supported, good practices can help in reducing the defect turnaround time.

Similarly since module owner will have to support multiple devices & multiple versions of software, proper root causing can help the module owners to act on the issue immediately without the need for the module owners to analyze the issue from scratch. Reproducing the defect can help in proper root-causing.

Since there will be possibility of occurrence of same defect in other versions of software, identifying such defects which would have been fixed in other previous projects can help in re-using the code obviating the need to develop a new fix.

There will be high possibility that defects reported are duplicates. Identifying those duplicates will definitely save time & efforts.

Additionally, usage of tools to profile CPU usage, memory, power and to capture logs will help in improving the defect analysis, description and possibly propose a fix to module owner.

Sasken typically proposes this method to its customers so that development team can save time & effort for new features or enhancing existing features.