Investigating Defect Detection in Object-Oriented Design and Cost-Effectiveness of Software Inspection

As the use of software grows in today’s society, software quality is becoming an increasingly important issue, and the need for activities to control and improve it is increasing dramatically. Software inspection has been extensively used for over thirty years to ensure the quality of software, by finding and repairing defects in software products. However, the yet narrow scope of research has been centred on inspection of Object-Oriented artifacts. Moreover, few methods have been developed for evaluating inspections and deciding whether they are cost-effective, as compared to other quality assurance techniques, such as testing. A typical inspection process consists of two stages critical for defect detection: individual inspection (preparation) followed by inspection meeting. Recently, the controversy of inspection meeting effectiveness has been raised in the literature, because the cost of organizing and conducting them is high, while there is no net meeting gain. Thus, further research is needed in order to allow evaluation of effectiveness and efficiency of these inspection stages. This thesis addresses the issues of effective defect detection in Object-Oriented design, usefulness of inspection meetings and evaluation of cost-effectiveness of inspection. As a result, two inspection strategies (reading techniques), namely Checklist-Based Reading and Perspective-Based Reading, are developed and experimentally evaluated. Furthermore, four new metrics to allow more precise evaluation of inspection as compared to the conventional methods are proposed, and their usefulness is demonstrated using the data collected from an experimental investigation. Two of these metrics, namely Preparation Losses Ml_IDV and Inspection Meeting Losses Ml_MEET, are intended for evaluation of the cost wasted during preparation and inspection meeting stages of an inspection process due to false positives (erroneously identified defects). Another two, namely Extended Cost Effectiveness of Preparation Mg_IDV and Extended Cost Effectiveness of Preparation and Inspection Meeting Mg_MEET, are aimed at evaluating cost-effectiveness of preparation and inspection meeting stages. The overall results indicate that the inspection techniques and metrics proposed in this thesis may facilitate the work of researchers and practitioners when utilizing and evaluating software inspection. In this thesis, Chapter 1 briefly describes the overview and contribution of the thesis.