Using reading techniques to focus inspection performance

Abstract

SofnYare inspection is a quality assurance method to detect defects early during the software development process. For inspection planning there are defect detection techniques, so-called reading techniques, which let the inspection planner focus the effectiveness of individual inspectors on specific sets of defects. For realistic planning it is important to use empirically evaluated defect detection techniques.In this paper we report on the replication of a largescale experiment in an academic environment. The experiment evaluated the efectiveness of defect detection jor inspectors who use a checklist orfocused scenarios on individual and team level.A main finding of the experiments is that the teams were effective to find defects: In both experiments the inspection teams found on average more than 70% ofthe defects in the product. The checklist consistently was overall somewhat more effective on individual level, while the scennrios traded overall defect detection effectiveness for much better effectiveness regarding their target focus, in our case specific parts ofthe documents.Another main result of the study is that scenario-based reading techniques can be used in inspection planning to focus individual performance without signijcant loss of effectiveness on team level.Keywords: S o f i a r e inspection process, defect detection techniques, quality measurement, replicated experiment, empirical sofhvare engineering.

On Empirical Comparison of Checklist-based Reading and Adhoc Reading for Code Inspection

“…In [10] and [11], PBR was investigated in relation to CBR by different authors and they all discovered that there is no significant difference between the effectiveness of PBR and CBR. Comparing and extrapolating all these findings one would expect that there will be a significant difference between the effectiveness of CBR and ad hoc reading.…”

Tailoring a COTS group support system for software requirements inspection

“…In these empirical studies we gathered inspection data from 60 inspection teams (between 5 and 6 inspectors each) on two inspection cycles [2] [16]. In our studies we applied Fagan's traditional inspection process [SI and focused on the inspection of requirements documents.…”

“…Thus a main thread in software inspection research deals with optimizing the software inspection process to different environments and inspected artifacts in order to reduce the risk of costly and ineffective software inspection runs. For example, we have performed two large-scale controlled experiments to empirically evaluate inspection process dynamics [2][3] [16].…”

An empirical study on groupware support for software inspection meetings

“…All seeded defects could be found by the inspectors without referring to additional documents. Please refer to [3] and [10] for details on these aspects of the experiment.…”

“…The first two experiments A and B studied the influence of different reading techniques on inspection performance. For details on Experiments A and B see [3,4] for a comparison of the two experiments see [10]. Experiments A and B used checklist-based reading (CBR) and scenario-based reading techniques.…”