Investigating the impact of active guidance on design inspection

  • Authors:

  • Dietmar Winkler;Stefan Biffl;Bettina Thurnher

  • Affiliations:

  • Institut of Software Technology, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria;Institut of Software Technology, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria;Institut of Software Technology, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

  • Venue:
  • PROFES'05 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Product Focused Software Process Improvement
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Software inspection helps to improve the quality of software products early in the development process. For design inspection recent research showed that usage-based reading of documents is more effective and efficient than traditional checklists. Usage-based reading guides actively the inspector with pre-sorted use cases, while traditional checklists let the inspector figure out how best to proceed. This paper investigates the impact of active guidance on an inspection process: We introduced checklists that give the inspector a process to follow, which should be as flexible as traditional checklists but more efficient. We compared the performance of this approach in a controlled experiment in an academic environment with traditional checklist and usage-based reading. Main results of the investigation are (a) checklists with active guidance are significantly more efficient than traditional checklists for finding major defects and (b) usage-based reading is more effective and efficient than both types of checklists. These results suggest that active guidance improves the efficiency of inspectors while the upfront investment into usage-based reading pays off during inspection.