Mission Ready Software

Forty years ago, while developing mission and safety-critical electronic warfare software, Ann Marie Neufelder made a seemingly minor coding error that led to serious consequences. This incident prompted a profound realization: software defects are both predictable and preventable.

Over the next four decades, she dedicated herself to collecting and analyzing hundreds of thousands of software defects. Her research revealed that this vast number of defects could be traced back to just a few hundred unique root causes. A striking discovery was that over 70% of these defects originate in the pre-coding phases of development.

In her pursuit of understanding and preventing defects, she benchmarked more than 600 development factors against actual defect density in testing and operations. This extensive work culminated in a machine learning model capable of predicting software defect density. Her findings challenged conventional wisdom, showing that many widely-used development practices are not as effective at reducing defects as commonly believed. To help organizations optimize their efforts, she created an ROI sensitivity analysis. This analysis identifies which development factors are inefficient and which provide the greatest return on investment for defect reduction.

The Requs AI product suite is the culmination of her work, built upon the world’s largest databases of software defects and software defect density benchmarks.