Book Description

Cleanroom software engineering is a theory-based, team-oriented process for on-schedule development and certification of ultrahigh reliability software systems with improved productivity under statistical quality control. The Cleanroom name is borrowed from hardware Cleanrooms, with their emphasis on prevention of errors through engineering discipline, rather than error removal. Cleanroom combines rigorous methods of software specification, design, correctness verification, and statistical quality certification in a new life cycle model based on incremental development. You can use the Cleanroom process and supporting technologies to develop software systems that approach zero defects and have scientifically certified reliability for operational field use. In contrast to traditional development approaches, in the Cleanroom process you embed software development and testing within a formal statistical quality control process. In such a process, software engineering is required to create software that approaches zero defects and can enter system testing directly. Then statistical usage-based testing is used to provide statistical inferences about the reliability of the software. This systematic process of assessing and controlling software quality during development permits you to certify product reliability at delivery, based on a complete public record of the testing and all engineering change activity required to deliver acceptable software. The significance of a process under statistical quality control is well illustrated by modem manufacturing techniques where the sampling of output is directly fed back into the process to control quality. Once the discipline of statistical quality control is in place, management has objective visibility into the software development process and can control process changes to control product quality.