Reading is a fundamental technology for achieving quality software. Th
is paper provides a motivation for reading as a quality improvement te
chnology, based upon experiences in the Software Engineering Laborator
y at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and shows the evolution of our
study of reading via a series of experiments. The experiments range fr
om early reading vs. testing experiments to various Cleanroom experime
nts that employed reading to the development of new reading technologi
es currently under study. (C) 1997 by Elsevier Science Inc.