Industrial Experience in Using a GSS for Software Inspections

Fagan inspections are a structured review of software development documents that consists of individual preparation, a meeting and rework by the author of the document. The meeting is used to log the defects found in preparation and to search for more defects. The effectiveness and efficiency of the meeting is often low as compared to that of the preparation. This paper describes the results of the routine use of a Group Support System (GSS) to support inspections in the Baan Company. The results of 87 GSS inspections are compared to those of 102 traditional inspections. The results indicate that mature inspections show a higher effectiveness and efficiency if they are supported by a GSS. The difference is up to 40 percent, both in terms of Major defects per thousand lines of source code and in Major defects per person hour invested in preparation and logging. The benefit of using a GSS disappears, however, if the inspection process is not followed properly and the preparation rate is too high. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for both software engineering and GSS usage.