Overview

The Test Effectiveness team is engaged in researching and developing tools that push quality earlier in the product life cycle.  Currently, we are focused on three main challenges: 

•	Understanding dependency relationships within and across large software systems.
•	Analyzing the root cause of defects found during critical stages of the product.
•	Early awareness of failures and breaking changes in the software lifecycle.

Key infrastructures and tools are being built to address these challenges enabling us to realize the following:  dependency collection and analysis across all components to identify where architecture and componentization adjustments should take place, and techniques for classifying defects to improve detection and prevention.  Some of the tools include MaX (dependency analysis), Defect RCA (root cause analysis), Tempest (failure estimation at the desktop), and CompatCheck (breaking change detection).