What we have learned about fighting defects

The Center for Empirically Based Software Engineering helps improve software development by providing guidelines for selecting development techniques, recommending areas for further research, and supporting software engineering education. A central activity toward achieving this goal has been the running of "e- Workshops" that capture expert knowledge with a minimum of overhead effort to formulate heuristics on a particular topic. The resulting heuristics are a useful summary of the current state of knowledge in an area based on expert opinion. This paper discusses the results to date of a series of e-Workshops on software defect reduction. The original discussion items are presented along with an encapsulated summary of the expert discussion. The reformulated heuristics can be useful both to researchers (for pointing out gaps in the current state of the knowledge requiring further investigation) and to practitioners (for benchmarking or setting expectations about development practices).