A Comparison of Tool-Based and Paper-Based Software Inspection

  • Authors:

  • F. MacDonald;J. Miller

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University of Strathclyde,;Department of Computer Science, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow G1 1XH, United Kingdom

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

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Abstract

Software inspectionis an effective method of defect detection. Recent research activityhas considered the development of tool support to further increasethe efficiency and effectiveness of inspection, resulting ina number of prototype tools being developed. However, no comprehensiveevaluations of these tools have been carried out to determinetheir effectiveness in comparison with traditional paper-basedinspection. This issue must be addressed if tool-supported inspectionis to become an accepted alternative to, or even replace, paper-basedinspection. This paper describes a controlled experiment comparingthe effectiveness of tool-supported software inspection withpaper-based inspection, using a new prototype software inspectiontool known as ASSIST (Asynchronous/Synchronous Software InspectionSupport Tool). 43 students used ASSIST and paper-based inspectionto inspect two C++ programs of approximately 150 lines. The subjectsperformed both individual inspection and a group collection meeting,representing a typical inspection process. It was found thatsubjects performed equally well with tool-based inspection aswith paper-based, measured in terms of the number of defectsfound, the number of false positives reported, and meeting gainsand losses.