Measurable Software Quality Improvement through Innovative Software Inspection Technologies at Allianz Life Assurance

The development of high quality software satisfying cost, schedule, and resource requirements is an essential prerequisite for improved competitiveness of life insurance companies. One major difficulty to master this challenge is the inevitability of defects in software products. Since defects are known to be significantly more expensive if detected in later development phases or testing, companies in this marketplace must use cost-effective technologies to detect defects early on in the development process. A particular promising one is software inspection. This paper describes the ESPRIT/ESSI Process Improvement Experiment "High Quality of Software Products by Early Use of Innovative Reading Techniques (HYPER)". The core of this project has been the transfer of innovative software inspection technologies to the Allianz EURO conversion projects. The innovation in the area of software inspection is based on a systematic reading technique, that is, Perspective-based reading (PBR), that tells inspection participants what to look for and more important how to scrutinise a software artefact for defects. Although numerous controlled experiments have shown the PBR technique to be particularly cost-effective, few results have been reported on its use in the context of development projects. The paper presents in a quantitative manner the final results regarding the application of PBR inspections on requirements and design documents in the ESSI PIE. The results are based on 9 requirements and 44 design inspections and demonstrate the benefits to be expected from PBR inspections in an industrial environment.