An Experimental Evaluation of Capture-Recapture in Software Inspections

The use of capture-recapture to estimate the residual faults in a software artifact has evolved as a promising method. However, the assumptions needed to make the estimates are not completely fulfilled in software development, leading to an underestimation of the residual fault content. Therefore, a method employing a filtering technique with an experience factor to improve the estimates of the residual faults is proposed in this paper. An experimental study of the capture-recapture method with this correction method has been conducted. It is concluded that the correction method improves the capturerecapture estimate of the number of residual defects in the inspected document.