Abstract

Any customer buying or using a product or services first thinks of quality. Quality is directly associated with what an end user expects to work and whether it’s working as per requirements or features delivered. Anything not working as expected after delivery is a defect. If end- user experiences are not meeting as per his requirements, then it can be said that quality is not good; it’s not meeting expectations. So, basically, quality is associated with meeting all requirements as per expectations. As per ISO 9000, quality is the degree to which a commodity meets the requirements of the customer at the start of its life. The late American Management guru Peter F. Drucker said, “Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for” [1]. Quality can be measured in terms of whether it’s meeting requirement or not, what percentage of customers are accepting or passing and what percentage of customers are rejecting or failing. If quality is not meeting its customer needs then it has defects. Defects play a major role in improving customer experiences and satisfaction. Defects detection and fix them is very crucial and so it’s very critical to keep track of them in defect database from the beginning of software design and development to delivery to the customers. Defects are usually analyzed, and root caused to improve the technical and procedural aspects to help improve quality. One of analysis technique is RCA – root cause analysis of defects [2]. A case study is conducted in Organization X on an Android- based embedded system software Product Y. For the privacy reasons, organization and product names are protected in this paper. Collected data is analyzed based on Histograms, Pareto Charts, Figures and root cause analysis (RCA) is done on that. Since data record size is based on almost 21K defects all analysis is based on Microsoft Excel- based functions. A focus of this case study is defect data analysis & test data analysis and formulate a way to define the current quality model. This case study also focuses on defect data analysis using the RCA method to define root cause and corrective actions. All stages of research and case study are explained in detail based on mathematical analysis of data available.

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