Classifying defects in software maintenance to support decisions using hierarchical ODC
Software maintenance is a critical part in software life cycle where fast production deployment and effectiveness for high quality software are pressure factors. For cloud and regular Service Providers such as out sourcing enterprises it is a key factor of success due to service level agreements closed to customer needs. Although, more high level tools of system monitoring are available into market to increase high availability, a lot of software packages go to service providers with fatal bugs. The effectiveness in terms of service components failure identification and priorities definition focused on incidents information are few used. This paper presents a method to extend orthogonal defect classification (ODC) in terms of triggers and sources attributes in a hierarchical way to improve technical support decisions in service providers. This approach classifies better errors on this phase using service components in software maintenance from incidents history. The ODC original triggers and sources are decomposed in values closely related to software maintenance service components without change the orthogonality essence of original ODC using a drill-down feature. These attributes are used with ODC defect type and ODC impact in a multi- dimensional modeling. This method reaches better service errors identification, remove it earlier than standard methods and better process feedback to manage service provider decisions. The method suggests an improvement in service providers functionality based on experiments.