CAIS: collaborative asynchronous inspection of software

Many software engineering tasks have a synchronous component that requires the participants to assemble together at the same time and place. This approach is expensive in terms of traveling, scheduling and human resources. Existing computer tools mitigate these constraints by adding structure to the meeting, providing on-line document support, and distributing the participants over geographic boundaries. The constraint remains, however, that all participants participate at the same timeWe propose relaxing the time constraint in software engineering tasks to resolve issues non-concurrently, in effect reducing (and in some cases eliminating) the need for the synchronous meeting. We hypothesize that support for asynchrony will enable software engineering teams to work together as effectively in different times as in same time.We have chosen software inspection as our candidate software engineering task because it is well-understood, highly-structured, and widely-practiced. We have designed and developed a Collaborative Asynchronous Inspection of Software (CAIS) meeting prototype that supports the meeting part of inspection. CAIS allows participants to effectively "meet" even when separated by time zones and working schedules. We have conducted a pilot study comparing the manual and CAIS meetings and present our results and lessons learned.

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