An Industrial Case Study to Examine a Non-Traditional Inspection Implementation for Requirements Specifications

  • Authors:

  • Oliver Laitenberger;Thomas Beil;Thilo Schwinn

  • Affiliations:

  • Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Sauerwiesen 6, 67661 Kaiserslautern, Germany/ oliver.laitenberger@iese.fhg.de;DaimlerChrysler AG Research and Technology, D-89013 Ulm, Germany/ thomas.beil@daimlerchrysler.com;DaimlerChrysler AG Research and Technology, D-89013 Ulm, Germany/ thilo.schwinn@daimlerchrysler.com

  • Venue:
  • Empirical Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2002

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Software inspection is one of the key enablers for quality improvement and defect cost reduction. Although its benefits are shown in many studies, a major obstacle in implementing and applying inspection technologies in software projects remains the cost factor. Therefore, companies are interested in the most cost-effective inspection implementation. This interest, however, cannot be addressed appropriately without preliminary discussion about the inspection process design and the method of performing the selected process activities. As a consequence, the tailored process and activities often result in an inspection implementation that perfectly fits into a project or environment but is different to the traditional ones presented in the existing inspection literature. In this paper, we present and examine a non-traditional inspection implementation at DaimlerChrysler AG. The design of this inspection approach evolved over time as part of a continuous improvement effort and therefore integrates specific issues of the project environment as well as recent research findings. In addition to the description of the inspection approach, the paper presents qualitative as well as quantitative results to characterize the suggested inspection implementation and investigates some of the essential hypotheses in the inspection area. Both, the technical description as well as its quantitative underpinning serves as an example for other companies that pursue similar improvement or adaptation efforts.