Abstract
Abstract in Undetermined
Root cause analysis (RCA) is a structured investigation of a problem to detect the causes that need to be prevented. We applied ARCA, an RCA method, to target problems of four medium-sized software companies and collected 648 causes of software engineering problems. Thereafter, we applied grounded theory to the causes to study their types and related process areas. We detected 14 types of causes in 6 process areas. Our results indicate that development work and software testing are the most common process areas, whereas lack of instructions and experiences, insufficient work practices, low quality task output, task difficulty, and challenging existing product are the most common types of the causes. As the types of causes are evenly distributed between the cases, we hypothesize that the distributions could be generalizable. Finally, we found that only 2.5% of the causes are related to software development tools that are widely investigated in software engineering research.
Root cause analysis (RCA) is a structured investigation of a problem to detect the causes that need to be prevented. We applied ARCA, an RCA method, to target problems of four medium-sized software companies and collected 648 causes of software engineering problems. Thereafter, we applied grounded theory to the causes to study their types and related process areas. We detected 14 types of causes in 6 process areas. Our results indicate that development work and software testing are the most common process areas, whereas lack of instructions and experiences, insufficient work practices, low quality task output, task difficulty, and challenging existing product are the most common types of the causes. As the types of causes are evenly distributed between the cases, we hypothesize that the distributions could be generalizable. Finally, we found that only 2.5% of the causes are related to software development tools that are widely investigated in software engineering research.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | [Host publication title missing] |
| Pages | 388-391 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2011 |
| Event | Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), 2011 International Symposium on - Banff, Alberta, Canada Duration: 2011 Sept 22 → 2011 Sept 23 |
Publication series
| Name | |
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| ISSN (Print) | 1938-6451 |
Conference
| Conference | Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), 2011 International Symposium on |
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| Country/Territory | Canada |
| City | Banff, Alberta |
| Period | 2011/09/22 → 2011/09/23 |
Subject classification (UKÄ)
- Computer Sciences