TABLE OF CONTENTS The term defect and its relationship to the terms error and failure in the context of the software development domain has been discussed in Chapter 2. Defects have detrimental affects on software users, and software engineers work very hard to produce high-quality software with a low number of defects. But even under the best of development circumstances errors are made, resulting in defects being injected in the software during the phases of the software life cycle. Defects as shown in Figure 3.1 stem from the following sources [1], [2]:
Education: The software engineer did not have the proper educational background to prepare the software artifact. She did not understand how to do something. For example, a software engineer who did not understand the precedence order of operators in a particular programming language could inject a defect in an equation that uses the operators for a calculation.
Communication: The software engineer was not informed about something by a colleague. For example, if engineer 1 and engineer 2 are working on interfacing modules, and engineer 1 does not inform engineer 2 that a no error checking code will appear in the interfacing module he is developing, engineer 2 might make an incorrect assumption relating to the presence/absence of an error check, and a defect will result.
Oversight: The software engineer omitted to do something. For example, a software engineer might omit an initialization statement.
Transcription: The software engineer knows...
