Does Every Inspection Really Need a Meeting?

  • Authors:

  • Philip M. Johnson;Danu Tjahjono

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, 96822 USA. E-mail johnson@hawaii.edu;Department of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, 96822 USA

  • Venue:
  • Empirical Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

Software review is a fundamental component of the softwarequality assurance process, yet significant controversies surroundthe most efficient and effective review method. A central questionsurrounds the use of meetings; traditional review practice viewsthem as essential, while more recent findings question theirutility. To provide insight into this question, we conducteda controlled experiment to assess several measures of cost andeffectiveness for a meeting and non-meeting-based review method.The experiment used CSRS, a computer mediated collaborative softwarereview environment, and 24 three person groups. We found thatthe meeting-based review method studied was significantly morecostly than the non-meeting-based method, but that meeting-basedreview did not find significantly more defects than the non-meeting-basedmethod. However, the meeting-based review method was significantlybetter at reducing the level of false positives, and subjectssubjectively preferred meeting-based review over non-meeting-basedreview. This paper presents the motivation for this experiment,its design and implementation, our empirical findings, pointersto Internet repositories for replication or additional analysisof this experiment, conclusions, and future directions.