AN EXPERIMENT TO ASSESS THE COST-BENEFITS OF CODE INSPECTIONS IN LARGE-SCALE SOFTWARE-DEVELOPMENT

We conducted a long-term experiment to compare the costs and benefits of several different software inspection methods. These methods were a pplied by professional developers to a commercial software product the y were creating. Because the laboratory for this experiment was a live development effort, we took special care to minimize cost and risk to the project, while maximizing our ability to gather useful data. This article has several goals: 1) to describe the experiment's design and show how we. used simulation techniques to optimize it, 2) to present our results and discuss their implications for both software practiti oners acid researchers, and 3) to discuss several new questions raised by our findings. For each inspection, we randomly assigned three inde pendent variables: 1) the number of reviewers on each inspection team (1, 2, or 4), 2) the number of teams inspecting the code unit (1 or 2) , and 3) the requirement that defects be repaired between the first an d second team's inspections. The reviewers for each inspection were ra ndomly selected without replacement from a pool of 11 experienced soft ware developers. The dependent variables for each inspection included inspection interval (elapsed time), total effort, and the defect detec tion rate. Our results showed that these treatments did not significan tly influence the defect detection effectiveness, but that certain com binations of changes dramatically increased the inspection interval.