An experiment to assess different defect detection methods for software requirements inspections
A. A. Porter, Lawrence G. Votta · 1994
Software requirements specifications (SRS) are usually validated by inspections, in which several reviewers read all or part of the specification and search for defects. We hypothesize that different methods for conducting these searches may have significantly different rates of success. Therefore, we designed and performed an experiment to assess the effect of different detection methods on the probability of detecting defects in a software specification document. Preliminary results of our first run with 24 reviewers, assembled in 3 member teams, indicate that a scenariobased detection method, in which each reviewer executes a specific procedure to discover a particular class of defects is more effective than either ad hoc or checklist methods. We describe the design, execution, and analysis of the experiment so others may reproduce it and test our results for different kinds of software developments and different populations of software engineers. This work is supported in part by ...