An Experiment to Assess the Cost-Benefits of Code Inspections in Large
Scale Software Development.
An Experiment to Assess the Cost-Benefits of Code Inspections in Large
Scale Software Development.
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Date
1998-10-15
Authors
Porter, Adam A.
Toman, C. A.
Siy, Harvey
Votta, Lawrence G.
Advisor
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Abstract
We conducted a long-term experiment to compare the costs and benefits of
several different software inspection methods. These methods were applied
by professional developers to a commercial software product they were
creating. Because the laboratory for this experiment was a live
development effort, we took special care to minimize cost and risk to the
project, while maximizing our ability to gather useful data.
This article has several goals: (1) to describe the experiment's design
and show how we used simulation techniques to optimize it, (2) to present
our results and discuss their implications for both software practitioners
and researchers, and (3) to discuss several new questions raised by our
findings.
For each inspection we randomly assigned 3 independent variables: (1) the
number of reviewers on each inspection team (1,2, or 4), (2) the number of
teams inspection the code unit (1 or 2), and (3) the requirement that
defects be repaired between the first and second team's inspections. The
reviewers for arch inspection were randomly selected without replacement
from a pool of 11 experienced software developers. The dependent
variable for each inspection included inspection interval (elapsed time),
total effort, and the defect detection rate.
Our results are based on the observation of 88 inspection s and challenge
certain long-held beliefs about the most cost-effective ways to conduct
inspections and raise some questions about the benefits of recently
proposed methods.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-97-20)