An empirical study of an ER-model inspection meeting

A great benefit of software inspections is that they can be applied at almost any stage of the software development life cycle. We document a large-scale experiment conducted during an entity relationship (ER) model inspection meeting. The experiment was aimed at finding empirically validated answers to the question "which reading technique has a more efficient detection rate when searching for defects in an ER model". Secondly, the effect of the usage of roles in a team meeting was also explored. Finally, we investigate the reviewers' ability to find defects belonging to certain defect categories. The findings showed that the participants using a checklist had a significantly higher detection rate than the ad hoc groups. Overall, the groups using roles had a lower performance than those without roles. Furthermore, the findings showed that when comparing the groups using roles to those without roles, the proportion of syntactic and semantic defects found in the number of overall defects identified did not significantly differ.