Studies on reading techniques
Victor Robert Basili, Gianluigi Caldiera, Filippo Lanubile, Forrest J. Shull · 1996
Introduction Software reading is a key technical activity that aims at achieving whatever degree of understanding is needed to accomplish a particular objective. The various work documents associated with software development (e.g., requirements, design, code, and test plans) often require continual understanding, review and modification throughout the development life cycle. Thus software reading, i.e., the individual analysis of textual software work products, is the core activity in many software engineering tasks: verification and validation, maintenance, evolution, and reuse. Through our work in the SEL, we have evolved our understanding of reading technologies via experimentation. We have run empirical studies ranging from blocked subject-project experiments (reading by step-wise abstraction vs. functional and structural testing [Basili,Selby87]) to replicated projects (University of Maryland Cleanroom study [Selby,Basili,Baker87]) to a case study (the first SEL Cleanroo