State-of-the-art: software inspections after 25 years

Software inspections, which were originally developed by Michael Fagan in 1976, are an important means to verify and achieve sufficient quality in many software projects today. Since Fagan’s initial work, the importance of software inspections has been long recognized by software developers and many organizations. Various proposals have been made by researchers in the hope of improving Fagan’s inspection. The proposals include structural changes to the process and several types of support for the inspection process. Most of the proposals have been empirically investigated in different studies. This is a review paper focusing on the software inspection process in the light of Fagan's inspection, and it summarizes and reviews other types of software inspection processes that have emerged in the last 25 years. The paper also addresses important issues related to the inspection process and examines experimental studies and their findings that are of interest with the purpose of identifying future avenues of research in software inspection.