An Empirical Comparative Study of Checklist based and Ad Hoc Code Reading Techniques in a Distributed Groupware Environment

Software inspection is a necessary and important tool for software quality assurance. Since it was introduced by Fagan at IBM in 1976, arguments exist as to which method should be adopted to carry out the exercise, whether it should be paper-based or toolbased, and what reading technique should be used on the inspection document. Extensive works have been done to determine the effectiveness of reviewers in paper-based environment when using ad hoc and checklist reading techniques. In this work, we take the software inspection research further by examining whether there is going to be any significant difference in defect detection effectiveness of reviewers when they use either ad hoc or checklist reading techniques in a distributed groupware environment. Twenty final year undergraduate students of computer science, divided into ad hoc and checklist reviewers groups of ten members each were employed to inspect a mediumsized java code synchronously on groupware deployed on the Internet. The data obtained were subjected to tests of hypotheses using independent t-test and correlation coefficients. Results from the study indicate that there are no significant differences in the defect detection effectiveness, effort in terms of time taken in minutes and false positives reported by the reviewers using either ad hoc or checklist based reading techniques in the distributed groupware environment studied.