An internally replicated quasi-experimental comparison of checklist and perspective-based reading of code documents

The basic premise of software inspections is that they detect and remove de fects before they propagate to subsequent development phases where their de tection and correction cost escalates. To exploit their full potential, sof tware inspections must call for a close and strict examination of the inspe cted artifact. For this, reading techniques for defect detection may be hel pful since these techniques tell inspection participants what to look for a nd, more importantly, how to scrutinize a software artifact in a systematic manner. Recent research efforts investigated the benefits of scenario-base d reading techniques. A major finding has been that these techniques help i nspection teams find more defects than existing state-of-the-practice appro aches, such as, ad-hoc or checklist-based reading (CBR). In this paper, we experimentally compare one scenario-based reading technique, namely, perspe ctive-based reading (PBR), for defect detection in code documents with the more traditional CBR approach. The comparison was performed in a series of three studies, as a quasi experiment and two internal replications, with a total of 60 professional software developers at Bosch Telecom GmbH. Meta-an alytic techniques were applied to analyze the data. Our results indicate th at PER is more effective than CBR (i.e., it resulted in inspection teams de tecting more unique defects than CBR) and that the cost of defect detection using PER is significantly lower than CBR. Therefore, this study provides evidence demonstrating the efficacy of PER scenarios for code documents in an industrial setting.