Key Lessons in Achieving Widespread Inspection Use

  • Authors:

  • Robert B. Grady;Tom Van Slack

  • Affiliations:

  • Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto, CA;California Polytechnic State Univ., San Luis Obispo

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Software
  • Year:
  • 1994

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Abstract

Hewlett-Packard has distilled its experience in promoting software inspections into a model of how technology adoption occurs and a metric of where it stands. Its managers know when and how to accelerate efforts to adopt inspections and other best practices. Experience has shown that the return on investment in technology adoption efforts can be huge. At HP, inspection technology was adopted across the entire company in four recognizable stages, which are defined as: experimental, initial guidelines, widespread belief and adoption, and standardization. HP's inspections program has progressed through three of these stages. We address several key questions: What characterizes the four stages? What were the most important lessons learned? What situations led to failure or success? And most important, how can we apply what we learned to speed the adoption of other proven practices? The lessons related will give many who are directly or indirectly responsible for software process improvement more confidence that inspections apply to all software-development organizations.