Team-Based Fault Content Estimation in the Software Inspection Process

  • Authors:

  • Thomas Thelin

  • Affiliations:

  • Lund University

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

The main objective of software inspection is to detectfaults within a software artifact. This helps to reduce thenumber of faults and to increase the quality of a softwareproduct. However, although inspections have been performedwith great success, and although the quality of theproduct is increased, it is difficult to estimate the quality.During the inspection process, attempts with objective estimationsas well as with subjective estimations have beenmade. These methods estimate the fault content after an inspectionand give a hint of the quality of the product. Thispaper describes an experiment conducted throughout theinspection process, where the purpose is to compare the estimationmethods at different points. The experiment evaluatesteam estimates from subjective and objective faultcontent estimation methods integrated with the software inspectionprocess. The experiment was conducted at two differentuniversities with 82 reviewers. The result shows thatobjective estimates outperform subjective when point andconfidence intervals are used. This contradicts the previousstudies in the area.