Abstract
Software inspection helps to improve the quality of software products early in the development process. For design inspection recent research showed that usage-based reading of documents is more effective and efficient than traditional checklists. Usage-based reading guides actively the inspector with pre-sorted use cases, while traditional checklists let the inspector figure out how best to proceed. This paper investigates the impact of active guidance on an inspection process: We introduced checklists that give the inspector a process to follow, which should be as flexible as traditional checklists but more efficient. We compared the performance of this approach in a controlled experiment in an academic environment with traditional checklist and usage-based reading. Main results of the investigation are (a) checklists with active guidance are significantly more efficient than traditional checklists for finding major defects and (b) usage-based reading is more effective and efficient than both types of checklists. These results suggest that active guidance improves the efficiency of inspectors while the upfront investment into usage-based reading pays off during inspection.
Keywords
- inspection process improvement
- reading techniques
- software product improvement
- empirical software engineering
- active guidance
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Winkler, D., Biffl, S., Thurnher, B. (2005). Investigating the Impact of Active Guidance on Design Inspection. In: Bomarius, F., Komi-Sirviö, S. (eds) Product Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3547. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11497455_36
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11497455_36
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-26200-8
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