What is Six Sigma in Software Engineering?

Six Sigma in Software Engineering:

General Electric (GE) Corporation first began Six Sigma in 1995 after Motorola and Allied Signal blazed the Six Sigma trail. Since then, thousands of companies around the world have discovered the far-reaching benefits of Six Sigma. The purpose of Six Sigma is to improve processes to do things better, faster, and at a lower cost.

Six Sigma is mainly used for any activity that is concerned with cost, timeliness, and quality of results. Therefore, it applies to virtually every industry. Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach to eliminating defects in any process – from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service.

Characteristics of Six Sigma:

i. Define: It covers process mapping and flow-charting, project charter development, and problem-solving tools, and those are called 7-M tools.

ii. Measure: It covers the principles of measurement, continuous and discrete data, and scales of measurement. Measurement is an overview of the principle of variations and repeatability and reproducibility (RR) studies for continuous and discrete data.

iii. Analyze: Analyze defines establishing a process baseline, how determining process improvement goals, and knowledge discovery. It also includes descriptive and exploratory data analysis and data mining tools.

iv. Improve: It defines project management, risk assessment, process simulation, design of experiments (DOE), robust design concepts, and process optimization.

v. Control: It covers process control planning, using SPC for operational control and PRE-Control.