Reading Techniques for OO Design Inspections

Abstract

Inspections 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