Factors affecting design inspection effectiveness in software development

doi:10.1016/S0950-5849(96)01147-0

Information and Software Technology

Volume 39, Issue 4, April 1997, Pages 297-305

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0950-5849(96)01147-0 Get rights and content

Abstract

We report the results of an analysis of defect-escape data from design inspections in two maintenance releases of a large software product. We found that the less effective inspections were those with the largest time investment, the likelihood of defect escapes being clearly affected by the way in which the time was invested and by the size of the work product inspected. Regression analysis of the data resulted in logarithmic and exponential equations relating these variables to defect-escape probability. We conclude with some practical guidelines for improving inspection effectiveness.

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There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (12)

Encompassing life cycle centric survey of software inspection
2000, Journal of Systems and Software
This paper contributes an integrated survey of the work in the area of software inspection. It consists of two main sections. The first one introduces a detailed description of the core concepts and relationships that together define the field of software inspection. The second one elaborates a taxonomy that uses a generic development life-cycle to contextualize software inspection in detail.
After Fagan's seminal work presented in 1976, the body of work in software inspection has greatly increased and reached measured maturity. Yet, there is still no encompassing and systematic view of this research body driven from a life-cycle perspective. This perspective is important since inspection methods and refinements are most often aligned to particular life-cycle artifacts. It also provides practitioners with a roadmap available in their terms.
To provide a systematic and encompassing view of the research and practice body in software inspection, the contribution of this survey is, in a first step, to introduce in detail the core concepts and relationships that together embody the field of software inspection. This lays out the field key ideas and benefits and elicits a common vocabulary. There, we make a strong effort to unify the relevant vocabulary used in available literature sources. In a second step, we use this vocabulary to build a contextual map of the field in the form of a taxonomy indexed by the different development stages of a generic process. This contextual map can guide practitioners and focus their attention on the inspection work most relevant to the introduction or development of inspections at the level of their particular development stage; or to help motivate the use of software inspection earlier in their development cycle.
Our work provides three distinct, practical benefits: First, the index taxonomy can help practitioners identify inspection experience directly related to a particular life-cycle stage. Second, our work allows structuring of the large amount of published inspection work. Third, such taxonomy can help researchers compare and assess existing inspection methods and refinements to identify fruitful areas of future work.
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Defect propagation at the project-level: results and a post-hoc analysis on inspection efficiency
2017, Empirical Software Engineering
Quality of inspection of software requirements: A proposed measurement
2016, CIBSE 2016 - XIX Ibero-American Conference on Software Engineering

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Factors affecting design inspection effectiveness in software development

Abstract

Journal of Systems and Software

Software quality: an overview from the perspective of total quality management

IBM Systems Journal

Software inspections: an effective verification process

IEEE Software

Applied software measurement

Experiences with inspections in ultralarge-scale development

IEEE Software