Akinola S. Olalekan
Department of Computer Science, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
E-mail: solom202@yahoo.co.uk
Osofisan O. Adenike
Department of Computer Science, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
Abstract
Software review is a fundamental tool for software quality assurance. Nevertheless, there are significant controversies as to the most efficient and effective review method. One of the most important questions currently being debated is the utility of review meetings. Although almost all review methods are centered around the inspection meeting, recent findings call their value into question. This empirical work examines the effectiveness of some software inspection methods - preparation and collection meeting, using experimental proof approach. This was achieved by conducting a multi-trial experiment with major goals that characterizes the behaviour of existing approaches, and addresse the effects of the variations in the experiment settings. The short-term experiment was carried out on a medium-sized java code, seeded with 1 syntax error and 8 logical errors. The methods were assessed by randomly assigning different team sizes working in parallel to the code unit. Data gathered in the experiment included number of defects detected, total number of issues raised, total number of false positives reported as well as the time taken (effort) for both preparation and collection meeting steps. Results show that there were no significant differences between the effectiveness of the reviewers at both preparation and collection meeting as well as the effectiveness of lower team sizes and higher team sizes.
