An experiment family to investigate the defect detection effect of tool-support for requirements inspection

The inspection of software products can help to find defects early in the development process and to gather valuable information on product quality. An inspection is rather resource intensive and involves several tedious tasks like navigating, sorting, or checking. Tool support is thus hoped to increase effectiveness and efficiency. However, little empirical work is available that directly compares paper-based (i.e., manual) and tool-based software inspections. Existing reports on tool support for inspection generally tend to focus on code inspections while little can be found on requirements or design inspection. We report on an experiment family: two experiments on paper-based inspection and a third experiment to empirically investigate the effect of tool support regarding defect detection effectiveness and inspection effort in an academic environment with 40 subjects. Main results of the experiment family are: (a) The effectiveness is similar for manual and tool-supported inspections; (b) the inspection effort and defect overlap decreased significantly with tool support, while (c) efficiency increased considerably with tool support.

[1]  Douglas R. Vogel,et al.  Using Group Support Systems for Software Inspections , 2001, IEEE Softw..

[2]  Forrest Shull,et al.  The empirical investigation of Perspective-Based Reading , 1995, Empirical Software Engineering.

[3]  S. Biffl,et al.  Groupware Support for Software Requirements Inspection , 2001 .

[4]  Stefan Biffl,et al.  Investigating the Defect Detection Effectiveness and Cost Benefit of Nominal Inspection Teams , 2003, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[5]  Stefan Biffl,et al.  An economic approach for improving requirements negotiation models with inspection , 2003, Requirements Engineering.

[6]  Peter J. Middleton,et al.  Software Inspection , 1994, J. Inf. Technol..

[7]  Adam A. Porter,et al.  An experiment to assess different defect detection methods for software requirements inspections , 1994, Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[8]  Stefan Biffl,et al.  Using reading techniques to focus inspection performance , 2001, Proceedings 27th EUROMICRO Conference. 2001: A Net Odyssey.

[9]  Claes Wohlin,et al.  Using Students as Subjects—A Comparative Study of Students and Professionals in Lead-Time Impact Assessment , 2000, Empirical Software Engineering.

[10]  John C. Knight,et al.  An improved inspection technique , 1993, CACM.

[11]  James Miller,et al.  Assisting Asynchronous Software Inspection by Auto-Collation of Defect Lists , 1999 .

[12]  Stefan Biffl,et al.  A groupware-supported inspection process for active inspection management , 2002, Proceedings. 28th Euromicro Conference.

[13]  John D. Ferguson,et al.  ASSISTing Management Decisions in the Software Inspection Process , 2002, Inf. Technol. Manag..

[14]  Stefan Biffl,et al.  Investigating the influence of inspector capability factors with four inspection techniques on inspection performance , 2002, Proceedings Eighth IEEE Symposium on Software Metrics.

[15]  Oliver Laitenberger,et al.  Evaluating the usefulness and the ease of use of a Web-based inspection data collection tool , 1998, Proceedings Fifth International Software Metrics Symposium. Metrics (Cat. No.98TB100262).

[16]  Stefan Biffl,et al.  Tailoring a COTS group support system for software requirements inspection , 2001, Proceedings 16th Annual International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2001).

[17]  James Miller,et al.  A Comparison of Computer Support Systems for Software Inspection , 2004, Automated Software Engineering.

[18]  Walter F. Tichy,et al.  Hints for Reviewing Empirical Work in Software Engineering , 2000, Empirical Software Engineering.

[19]  Oliver Laitenberger,et al.  An encompassing life cycle centric survey of software inspection , 2000, J. Syst. Softw..

[20]  Chris Sauer,et al.  Technical Reviews: A Behaviorally Motivated Program of Research , 2022 .

[21]  F. MacDonald.  Automatic Collation of Software Inspection Defect Lists , 1998 .

[22]  Claes Wohlin,et al.  Experimentation in software engineering: an introduction , 2000 .

[23]  J. Miller,et al.  A Comparison of Tool-Based and Paper-Based Software Inspection , 1998, Empirical Software Engineering.

[24]  Michael E. Fagan.  Design and Code Inspections to Reduce Errors in Program Development , 1976, IBM Syst. J..

[25]  Michiel van Genuchten,et al.  Supporting inspections with an electronic meeting system , 1997, Proceedings of the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.