Design And Implementation Of Workflow Based Software Defect Management System

Software defect management system is an essential tool for each software company to improve its product quality, raise development efficiency, and reduce the cost of software production. However, with the fast development of information technology, software applications are getting increasingly more complex in function and larger in size. Furthermore, in order to survive in the market, software companies have carried out the strategies of globalization in organization and diversification in productions. Consequently, the requirements of the defect process are getting more and more complex, such as: (1) diversity of defect process: defect processes can be different between projects and defect types; (2) hierarchy of defect process: a software defect will be processed on different release branches which make process requiring a ?main-branch'hierarchy. In this new situation, the traditional software defect management system, which is usually based on solo built in defect management process, is falling short of demand.The main research target of the paper is to develop a new software defect management system with the core feature of building defect process model with workflow technology. The new system models the process in each status of the defect life cycle and it is able to model the different defect processes easily and supports multi-process. This new system will enhance the communication between different departments such as research & development, quality assurance and customer service/support. Furthermore, this system will improve the company's efficiency in resource allocation and shorten the response time of customer service. All these changes will help software companies to reduce the cost of development, management and maintenance works, increase the competitiveness of the product and improve the viability and profitability of the company itself.The main research tasks of the paper are listed as below:1. Study and investigate the reference model of workflow management system architecture proposed by Workflow Management Coalition. According to the reference model, in the paper, a simplified architecture is proposed which is able to complete the modeling of defect life cycles and offers defect management task scheduling and process monitoring as well. With the simplified architecture, the system is easy to implement, which shortens the development cycle.2. A simple but very flexible workflow engine– OSWorkflow is selected in system building according to the requirement of highly flexible of defect workflow modeling. And combined with the 3-tier architecture, MVC pattern and new spring framework using, the new system is a lightweight Java EE application which has good expansibility, security and safety. The system is using XML file to describe the defect life cycle model, which is easy for exchange, processing and management data between isomerism systems.3. In the research and exploration of the new defect management system, all theoretical knowledge is verified by a practice in an actual software company's replacement of its traditional system.The software defect management system based on workflow technology works well in the software company, especially in defect management modeling for various projects. It meets almost all key requirement of the new system.All components of the software defect management system, a simplified workflow management system architecture correspond with the reference model by WfMC, a flexible OSWorkflow engine and a lightweight Java EE framework Spring, etc., are open source and free, which control the whole development cost in low level. Meanwhile, this system can satisfy the requirement of defect management for large and medium-sized enterprises. Thus, it has a fairly good prospect in application.