Does every inspection need a meeting?

• Authors: Lawrence G. Votta, Jr.
• Venue: SIGSOFT '93 Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSOFT symposium on Foundations of software engineering
• Year: 1993

At each step in large software development, reviewers carry out inspections to detect faults. These inspections are usually followed by a meeting to collect the faults that have been discovered. However, we have found that these inspection meetings are not as beneficial as managers and developers think they are. Even worse, they cost much more in terms of products development interval and developer's time than anyone realizes.Analysis of the inspection and collection process leads us to make the following suggestions. First, at the least, the number of participants required at each inspection meeting should be minimized. Second, we propose two alternative fault collection methods, either of which would eliminate the inspection meetings altogether: (a) collect faults by deposition (small face-to-face meetings of two or three persons), or (b) collect faults using verbal or written media (telephone, electronic mail, or notes).We believe that such a change in procedure would increase efficiency by reducing production times without sacrificing product quality.