by Michael Halling, Stefan Biffl, Paul Grünbacher
Abstract:
The inspection of software products can help to find defects early in the development process and to gather valuable information on product quality. An inspection is rather resource-intensive and involves several tedious tasks like navigating, sorting, or checking. Tool support is thus hoped to increase effectiveness and efficiency. However, little empirical work is available that directly compares paper-based (i.e., manual) and tool-based software inspections. Existing reports on tool support for inspection generally tend to focus on code inspections while little can be found on requirements or design inspection. This paper reports on an experiment family: two experiments on paper-based inspection and a third experiment to empirically investigate the effect of tool support regarding defect detection effectiveness and inspection effort in an academic environment with 40 subjects. Main results of the experiment family are: (a) The effectiveness is similar for manual and tool-supported inspections; (b) the inspection effort and defect overlap decreased significantly with tool support, while (c) efficiency increased considerably with tool support.
Reference:
An Experiment Family to Investigate the Defect Detection Effect of Tool-Support for Requirements Inspection (Michael Halling, Stefan Biffl, Paul Grünbacher), In Proceedings 9th IEEE Int'l Software Metrics Symposium (METRICS 2003), 3-5 September, Sydney, Australia, IEEE Computer Society, 2003.
Bibtex Entry:
@Conference{Halling2003a,
author = {Michael Halling and Stefan Biffl and Paul Grünbacher},
title = {An Experiment Family to Investigate the Defect Detection Effect of
Tool-Support for Requirements Inspection},
booktitle = {Proceedings 9th IEEE Int'l Software Metrics Symposium (METRICS 2003),
3-5 September, Sydney, Australia},
year = {2003},
pages = {278-285},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
abstract = {The inspection of software products can help to find defects early
in the development process and to gather valuable information on
product quality. An inspection is rather resource-intensive and involves
several tedious tasks like navigating, sorting, or checking. Tool
support is thus hoped to increase effectiveness and efficiency. However,
little empirical work is available that directly compares paper-based
(i.e., manual) and tool-based software inspections. Existing reports
on tool support for inspection generally tend to focus on code inspections
while little can be found on requirements or design inspection. This
paper reports on an experiment family: two experiments on paper-based
inspection and a third experiment to empirically investigate the
effect of tool support regarding defect detection effectiveness and
inspection effort in an academic environment with 40 subjects. Main
results of the experiment family are: (a) The effectiveness is similar
for manual and tool-supported inspections; (b) the inspection effort
and defect overlap decreased significantly with tool support, while
(c) efficiency increased considerably with tool support.},
doi = {10.1109/METRIC.2003.1232474},
isbn = {0-7695-1987-3},
researchr = {http://researchr.org/publication/HallingBG03}
}