Impact of Background and Experience on Software Inspections

As the popularity of software grows so does the need for quality. In many contexts software inspections have become or are becoming an important part of the quality assurance effort for software products. Software inspections continue to spread across the industry. Inspections are a process whereby software artifacts are examined by a group of inspectors to ensure that they meet some set of quality constraints. Because the performance of different inspectors varies during an inspection, we decided to explore the causes of this variation. Because research has shown that the variations among inspectors can have a greater effect on the outcome of the inspection than the variations in the actual inspection process, we have chosen to focus our investigation on those variations among inspectors. We want to explore what types of defects inspectors having different backgrounds and experience find. There are three steps to this work: • Develop a useful defect classification scheme • Develop a list of Background and Experience variables • Determine how the variables relate to the defect classes We will be interested in investigating the overall performance of the different inspectors as well as their performance with respect to the defect classes in our defect classification schemes. We will perform our evaluation on data collected from experiments and other empirical studies. The details of these studies will be described as well as how the data will be used. The overall goal of this work is to provide inspection process mangers with a set of heuristics to guide their selection of inspectors for their inspection teams.