Skip to main content
European Commission logo
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
CORDIS Web 30th anniversary CORDIS Web 30th anniversary
Content archived on 2024-06-10

Continuous QFD-based quality improvement of software design process

Objective

IGA's main business includes the development of customised software to support project management during the setting up of production systems/plans in the manufacturing area (robotics assembly, PPS, etc.). Today's software development within IGA is highly customer oriented, but suffers from numerous iterative loops and from being very individual oriented with low information exchange among developers. The main objective of this project is to raise the quality and efficiency of the software development process:

to more completely satisfy customers' requirements
to obtain a more team-oriented approach to software development
to reduce software development time and costs by about 20%
and to increase reuse of program functions by up to 25% while increasing product quality

IGA is typical of many small and medium size software developing organisations, so the project's results may help others to achieve a better understanding of their customers' wishes, to improve estimation and to reduce development time and costs.

THE EXPERIMENT
A "Quality Function Deployment" (QFD)-based methodology will be introduced. This methodology is intended to support:

the correlation between the customer requirements and the functions of software components and modules to be used
costs and time estimates
performance review and measurement by metrics.

During the experiment, software engineers will use the QFD-based tool for managing their own work and co-operating with one another. The obtained improvements will be monitored by collecting suitable metrics. the experiment will be carried out on a baseline project: the development of new and revised modules for a project management software package.
IGA mbH employs 15 people, 6 of whom are involved in software development.

EXPECTED IMPACT AND EXPERIENCE
IGA mbH expects to improve the quality and efficiency of their software development process, and thereby achieve a more complete satisfaction of customer requirements. We plan to strengthen the continuous improvement process by extensive internal training, the building of a data base for the documentation of weak areas, failures and bottle-necks in existing modules, and the use of metrics to manage the whole software development process.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Call for proposal

Data not available

Coordinator

Ingenieurgesellschaft Für Automatisierung und Rationalisierung Gmbh
EU contribution
No data
Address
Joseph-Von-Fraunhofer 20
44227 Dortmund
Germany

See on map

Total cost
No data