Scaling up Distributed Software Inspections

Software inspections are a software engineering “best practice” for detecting and correcting defects in software artifacts, including requirements, design, code and test cases. Because defects are detected early in the software development process, software inspection improves software quality and reduces rework, thus saving time and costs. As a software process, inspections are adopted in many variants [6] by organizations such as Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, Lucent Technologies, Motorola, and NASA. However, software inspection has never become a mainstreaming process among industry practitioners, mainly because of clerical overhead and time bottlenecks. Furthermore, traditional inspection processes cannot be simply adapted for being included into “offshore development”, where large, permanent companies are replaced by temporary groups of developers collaborating on projects over the Internet. Because of its roots on manual activities and face-to-face team interactions the inspection process must be first reengineered and then supported by some Internet-mediated environment.