A family of experiments to investigate the effects of groupware for software inspection |
| |
Authors: | Stefan Biffl Paul Grünbacher Michael Halling |
| |
Affiliation: | (1) Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology, 1040 Vienna, Austria;(2) Christian Doppler Laboratory for Automated Software Engineering, Johannes Kepler University Linz, 4040 Linz, Austria;(3) Department of Finance, University of Vienna, 1210 Vienna, Austria |
| |
Abstract: | It is widely accepted that the inspection of software artifacts can find defects early in the development process and gather
information on the quality of the evolving product. However, the inspection process is resource-intensive and involves tedious
tasks, such as searching, sorting, and checking. Tool support for inspections can help accelerating these tasks and allows
inspectors to concentrate on tasks particularly needing human attention. Only few tools are available for inspections. We
have thus developed a set of groupware tools for both individual defect detection and inspection meetings to lower the effort
of inspections and to increase their efficiency. This paper presents the Groupware-supported Inspection Process (GrIP) and describes tools for inspecting software requirements. As only little empirical work exists that directly compares paper-based
and tool-based software inspection, we conducted a family of experiments in an academic environment to empirically investigate
the effect of tool support regarding defect detection and inspection meetings. The main results of our family of experiments
regarding individual defect detection are promising: The effectiveness of inspectors and teams is comparable to paper-based
inspection without tool support; the inspection effort and defect overlap decreases significantly with tool support, while
the efficiency of inspection teams increases considerably. Regarding tool support for inspection meetings the main findings
of the experiments are that tool support considerably lowers the meeting effort, supports inspectors in identifying false
positives, and reduces the number of true defects lost during a meeting. The number of unidentified false positives is still
quite high. |
| |
Keywords: | Software inspection Defect detection Inspection meeting Tool support Software quality measurement Controlled experiment Empirical software engineering |
本文献已被 SpringerLink 等数据库收录! |
|