1. Defect removal effectiveness measures the percentage of defects found by a particular development activity compared to the total defects present. 2. Several metrics have been proposed to measure defect removal effectiveness, including error detection efficiency, removal efficiency, early detection percentage, and phase containment effectiveness. 3. Studies have shown that defect removal effectiveness tends to increase with higher levels of software process maturity based on the CMM, with level 1 organizations having around 85% effectiveness and level 5 organizations around 95% effectiveness.