Some experiences in the use of inspection teams

Because the complexity and sophistication of computer systems continue to increase, more and more areas of critical importance to the Company's viability are encompassed in the Data Processing domain. As this happens, special demands are made of D.P. staff by Users of computer systems. Users need software which gives them high total system availability. For this to be possible any repairs required to software must be made within a tight time (and cost) budget. The discipline of developing systems in a team environment with a tightly knit technical nucleus, is claimed to have come a long way towards meeting these demands. One of the Development Departments in our installation, which serves a large financial corporation, has experimented with another discipline to assist us to meet our User's requirements. We do not claim that we have done anything startlingly new. We have gathered ideas from various sources and applied them to our largely COBOL, largely batch situation. Since mid-1975 systems developed in this Department have been subjected to the discipline of the “INSPECTION PROCESS”.