by Stefan Biffl, Paul Grünbacher, Michael Halling
Abstract:
It is widely accepted that the inspection of software artifacts can find defects early in the development process and gather information on the quality of the evolving product. However, the inspection process is resource-intensive and involves tedious tasks, such as searching, sorting, and checking. Tool support for inspections can help accelerating these tasks and allows inspectors to concentrate on tasks particularly needing human attention. Only few tools are available for inspections. We have thus developed a set of groupware tools for both individual defect detection and inspection meetings to lower the effort of inspections and to increase their efficiency. This paper presents the Groupware-supported Inspection Process (GrIP) and describes tools for inspecting software requirements. As only little empirical work exists that directly compares paper-based and tool-based software inspection, we conducted a family of experiments in an academic environment to empirically investigate the effect of tool support regarding defect detection and inspection meetings. The main results of our family of experiments regarding individual defect detection are promising: The effectiveness of inspectors and teams is comparable to paper-based inspection without tool support; the inspection effort and defect overlap decreases significantly with tool support, while the efficiency of inspection teams increases considerably. Regarding tool support for inspection meetings the main findings of the experiments are that tool support considerably lowers the meeting effort, supports inspectors in identifying false positives, and reduces the number of true defects lost during a meeting. The number of unidentified false positives is still quite high.
Reference:
A family of experiments to investigate the effects of groupware for software inspection (Stefan Biffl, Paul Grünbacher, Michael Halling), In Automated Software Engineering, volume 13, 2006.
Bibtex Entry:
@ARTICLE{Biffl2006,
author = {Stefan Biffl and Paul Grünbacher and Michael Halling},
title = {A family of experiments to investigate the effects of groupware for
software inspection},
journal = {Automated Software Engineering},
year = {2006},
volume = {13},
pages = {373-394},
number = {3},
abstract = {It is widely accepted that the inspection of software artifacts can
find defects early in the development process and gather information
on the quality of the evolving product. However, the inspection process
is resource-intensive and involves tedious tasks, such as searching,
sorting, and checking. Tool support for inspections can help accelerating
these tasks and allows inspectors to concentrate on tasks particularly
needing human attention. Only few tools are available for inspections.
We have thus developed a set of groupware tools for both individual
defect detection and inspection meetings to lower the effort of inspections
and to increase their efficiency. This paper presents the Groupware-supported
Inspection Process (GrIP) and describes tools for inspecting software
requirements. As only little empirical work exists that directly
compares paper-based and tool-based software inspection, we conducted
a family of experiments in an academic environment to empirically
investigate the effect of tool support regarding defect detection
and inspection meetings. The main results of our family of experiments
regarding individual defect detection are promising: The effectiveness
of inspectors and teams is comparable to paper-based inspection without
tool support; the inspection effort and defect overlap decreases
significantly with tool support, while the efficiency of inspection
teams increases considerably. Regarding tool support for inspection
meetings the main findings of the experiments are that tool support
considerably lowers the meeting effort, supports inspectors in identifying
false positives, and reduces the number of true defects lost during
a meeting. The number of unidentified false positives is still quite
high.},
doi = {10.1007/s10851-006-8531-5}
}