ICEBERG “How to estimate costs of poor quality in a Software QA project: a novel approach to support management decisions”

The ICEBERG project proposers intend to carry out a sound Transfer of Knowledge (ToK) in the Software Quality Assurance domain, with the following two main objectives: 1. Boosting the researchers of the future: Creating a long lasting research network involving both the commercial and non-commercial sectors to foster co-operation based on joint research projects; Promoting innovation and knowledge transfer through secondment of researchers; Providing diverse career possibilities & research experience for researchers, knowledge sharing/exchange. 2. Starting from the Iceberg analogy, investigating, defining and implementing models-based process able to: Identify activities resulting from poor quality, Define how to estimate costs associated with i) testing activities in relation with a given quality and ii) missing, incomplete or wrong implementation of testing activities/phases, Collect data iteratively, and use it to estimate costs; Analyse results and support on decision-making on the next steps at quality management level in Telco and Finance domain. To achieve these main objectives, proposers will i) plan a well defined ToK, as well as ii) identify all the elements influencing the product/process cost and quality and create a shared database, to take advantage of the companys historical data for parameterization of prediction models. The final results of the project will be to provide researchers with new research skills and broad horizons in Software Quality Assurance related to models-based process, oriented to support decision-making applicable in Telco and Finance. The models-based process and the proof of concept IT tool will be evaluated on real test cases provided by the industrial partners and extensively described in the ICEBERG handbook.