Advanced Testing of Systems-of-Systems, Volume 2

8Defects Management

In systems-of-systems, defects management takes on its full role, as defects can be identified at the system-of-systems level often affecting several separate systems. It is therefore necessary to ensure that the organizations that developed each of the systems are aware of the existence of the defects, and of the development needs of each of their systems. These organizations do not generally share the same defect management tool, nor the same defect referencing system, which increases the complexity of management. In addition, the durations and cycles for fixing defects vary between organizations, which can lead to the implementation of temporary workarounds, which will have to be managed in configuration.

8.1. Defect management, MOA and MOE

8.1.1. What is a defect?

Several definitions exist to explain what a defect is and how can we separate a defect from a change request. There are often heated discussions between the business and the developers, some saying that the specifications – the user stories – did not specify something, while the others indicated that it was implied, that it did not correspond to normal usage by end users.

Let’s consider that a defect (a bug) is a behavior that does not correspond to something that has been specified or that is an expected behavior. From there, we could define two subtypes of defects: verification defects and validation defects.

A verification defect would be the case where a specification is not present ...