Browsing by Author "Carver, Jeffrey"
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Item Evolving a Set of Techniques for OO Inspections(1999-10-13) Shull, Forrest; Travassos, Guilherme H.; Carver, Jeffrey; Basili, Victor R.Inspecting OO designs is an important way of ensuring the quality of software under development. When high-level design activities are finished, the design documents can be inspected to verify whether they are consistent among themselves and whether the software requirements were correctly and completely captured. This paper discusses some issues regarding the definition and application of reading techniques (i.e. procedural guidelines that can be given to inspectors) to inspect high-level OO design documents. An initial set of OO Reading Techniques and their experimental evaluation is described. A method for evaluating the reading techniques in more detail, i.e. Observational Techniques, is then presented, and experiences with its use are discussed. Through these discussions, we show how the reading techniques have evolved in response to empirical evidence (both qualitative and quantitative) regarding their use in practice. The complete and current set of techniques can be found in the appendices. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-99-63)Item The Impact of Background and Experience on Software Inspections(2003-06-04) Carver, JeffreyThis dissertation is an initial study into the relationship between an inspector's characteristics and his or her effectiveness in an inspection. Research has shown that improving the individual effectiveness of the inspectors improves the overall effectiveness of an inspection team. But, the performance of inspectors varies widely, even when using the same inspection technique. This variation is often due to the inherent differences among the inspectors who used the technique. In order to better understand this variation and provide guidance to inspection planners, this dissertation has focused on the background and experience of the inspector as the source of variation. To study this issue I used a novel approach for software engineering, grounded theory. This methodology allowed hypotheses to be built both top-down, from the literature, as well as bottom-up, using data. The literature portion came from software engineering as well as education and psychology. The data portion came from both existing studies and newly designed studies. The data from existing studies allowed the initial hypotheses to become more concrete. Once some of the hypotheses had support from data, the final step was to design studies to test a subset of the hypotheses. I designed and ran two studies to test the selected hypotheses. The goal of the first study was to understand the type and level of experience with the software inspection process that was necessary. The earlier data had shown that process experience was important, but the effect of the type and level of experience was still unclear. The goal of the second study was to understand the interaction between an inspector's software development experience and the level of detail required in an inspection process. The earlier data had shown some indications that for experienced inspectors too much detail reduced the number of defects found, while less experienced inspectors needed more detail to overcome their lack of experience and find more defects. This dissertation presents complete list of hypotheses and the results of these studies along with some specific suggestions for both researchers and practitioners.Item Investigating the effect of Process Experience on Inspection Effectiveness(2003-04-04) Carver, Jeffrey; Shull, Forrest; Basili, VictorRequirements inspections are a process for improving the quality of software by allowing software developers to detect defects early in the lifecycle when they are cheaper to fix. One issue that arises is the experience level with a particular inspection technique an inspector needs before he or she is effective and efficient in using that technique. This technical report describes a study run in CMSC735 in Fall 2001. The goal of this study was to begin to understand the impact of process experience on a software inspection. Some of the subjects were given a chance to observe an inspection using the Perspective Based Reading (PBR) techniques before they had to use these techniques themselves. This report discusses how the particular experience with process was evaluated and how the efficiency and effectiveness of these subjects compared with that of the subjects who did not get the opportunity to observe someone else using PBR priorto their own use of it. UMIACS-TR-2003-12Item Reading Techniques for OO Design Inspections(2002-04-05) Travassos, Guilherme H.; Shull, Forrest; Carver, Jeffrey; Basili, VictorInspections can be used to identify defects in software artifacts. In this way, inspection methods help to improve software quality, especially when used early in software development. Inspections of software design can be especially crucial since design defects (problems of correctness and completeness with respect to the requirements, internal consistency, or other quality attributes) can directly affect the quality of, and effort required for, the implementation. We have created a new family of "reading techniques" (so called because they help a reviewer to "read" a design artifact for the purpose of finding relevant information) that gives specific and practical guidance for identifying defects in Object-Oriented designs. Each reading technique in the family focuses the reviewer on some aspect of the design, with the goal that an inspection team applying the entire family should achieve a high degree of coverage of the design defects. In this paper, we present an overview of this new set of reading techniques. We discuss how these techniques were developed and suggest how readers can use them to detect defects in high level object oriented design UML diagrams. Also UMIACS-TR-2002-33