An Empirical Study of Web-Based Inspection Meetings

Software inspections are a software engineering “best practice” for defect detection and rework reduction. In this paper, we describe an empirical evaluation with using a tool aiming to provide Internet groupware support for distributed software inspections. The tool is based on a restructured inspection process where inspection meetings have the only goal of removing false positives rather than finding additional defects. In place of face-to-face meetings, the tool provides web-based discussion forums and support for voting. We present an empirical study of nine remote inspections which were held as part of a university course. We investigated whether all collected defects are worth to be discussed as a group. Results show that discussions for filtering out false positives (non true defects) might be restricted to defects which were discovered by only one inspector.