This paper was accepted at the Workshop on Quantitative Approaches in Object-Oriented Software Engineering, in association with the 13 th European Conf. on Object-Oriented Programming, Lisbon, Portugal, 1999. 7RZDUGV 7HFKQLTXHV IRU,PSURYHG 22 'HVLJQ,QVSHF

A software inspection aims to guarantee that a particular software artifact is complete, consistent, unambiguous, and correct enough to effectively support further system development. For instance, inspections have been used to improve the quality of a system’s design and code [Fagan76]. Typically, inspections require individuals to review a particular artifact, then meet as a team to discuss and record defects, which are then sent to the document’s author to be corrected. Most publications concerning software inspections have concentrated on improving the inspection meetings while assuming that individual reviewers are able to effectively detect defects in software documents on their own (e.g. [Fagan86, Gilb93]). However, empirical evidence has questioned the importance of team meetings by showing that meetings do not contribute to finding a significant number of new defects that were not already found by individual reviewers [Votta93, Porter95]. “Software reading techniques” attempt to increase the effectiveness of inspections by providing procedural guidelines that can be used by individual reviewers to examine (or “read”) a given software artifact and identify defects. There is empirical evidence that software reading is a promising technique for increasing the effectiveness of inspections on different types of software artifacts, not just limited to source code [Porter95, Basili96, Basili96b, Fusaro97, Shull98, Zhang98]. Software reading can be performed on all documents associated with the software process, and is an especially useful method for detecting defects