The design and field evaluation of a repeatable collaborative software code inspection process

  • Authors:

  • Pushpa G. Koneri;Gert-Jan de Vreede;Douglas L. Dean;Ann L. Fruhling;Peter Wolcott

  • Affiliations:

  • College of Information Science & Technology, University of Nebraska at Omaha;College of Information Science & Technology, University of Nebraska at Omaha;Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University;College of Information Science & Technology, University of Nebraska at Omaha;College of Information Science & Technology, University of Nebraska at Omaha

  • Venue:
  • CRIWG'05 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Groupware: design, Implementation, and Use
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

The use of software products in today's world has increased dramatically making quality an important aspect of software development. There is a continuous need to develop processes to control and increase software quality. Software code inspection is one way to pursue this goal. This paper presents a collaborative code inspection process that was designed during an action research study using Collaboration Engineering principles and techniques. Our inspection process was implemented as a sequence of thinkLets, chunks of facilitation skill, that were subsequently field tested in a traditional paper-based and Group Support System (GSS)-based environment. It was found to be successful in uncovering many major, minor as well as false-positive defects in inspected pieces of code. Results illustrate the process' efficiency in identifying duplicate defects thereby reducing follow-up time to correct each defect. The inspection process' flexibility was observed as it was successfully applied to inspect both pieces of code or an entire module. Overall the collaborative inspection process was considered to be productive for code inspection and was satisfactory for the inspectors involved.