Metrics for Recommending Corrective and Preventive Actions (CAPAs) in Software Development Projects: a Systematic Literature Review

Several works attempted to establish procedures to individuate bugs, defects or anomalies during the different phases of software development, especially in the implementation phase. The mere detection of anomalies is not sufficient, though, at least until they get fixed. Corrective actions can be formulated to remove anomalies and enhance the software quality. Preventive actions are equally important in as much as they avoid the emergence and recurrence of anomalies in the future. To know whether an anomaly exists in any given software, one must measure the software quality attributes related to it using specific software metrics. The main aim of this work was to find out and explain how to meaningfully attribute software metrics to useful corrective and preventive actions.

However, to determine proper actions for the specific contexts, one needs to know more about the anomalies and about their root causes. In this study, we collected three kinds of data (metrics, anomalies, actions), which helped us individuate the dimensions of the problem. We found 384 software metrics, which are used to detect 374 anomalies related to 494 corrective and preventive actions. Our findings demonstrate the need to formulate remedial strategies and build tools to automate the process of determining actions from abnormal metric values.