A family of experiments to investigate the effects of groupware for software inspection (bibtex)
by Stefan Biffl, Paul Grünbacher and 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:
Stefan Biffl, Paul Grünbacher and Michael Halling: A family of experiments to investigate the effects of groupware for software inspection, 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}
}
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