Software inspection is a valuable technique for detecting defects in the products of software development. One avenue of research within inspection concerns the development of computer support. It is hoped that such support will provide even greater benefits when applying inspection. A number of prototype systems have been developed by researchers, yet these suffer from some fundamental limitations. One of the most serious of these concerns is the lack of facilities to monitor the process, and to provide the moderator with quantitative information on the performance of the process. The paper begins by briefly outlining the measurement component that has been introduced into the system, and especially discusses an approach to estimating the effectiveness of the current process.

Software inspection is a widely used method for finding defects in all types of software development documents. Many process variations exist, each designed for use under certain circumstances or to address some perceived deficiency in other methods. A desirable attribute of inspection is rigour, allowing the use of historical data to predict future performance and to suggest process improvements. Recent work in tool support for inspection is designed to tackle the issue of enforcing rigorous inspection, but these tools concentrate on enforcing a single, usually proprietary, method. This paper investigates existing inspection methods and derives a generic inspection process which can be used to describe any of these methods. This process is then used to determine a notation for describing any inspection process, which can consequently be used as input to an inspection support tool, allowing the support of any inspection method. The paper also demonstrates a system which uses the language to provide support for multiple inspection processes, and describes other desirable features of such a tool. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The benefits of the object-oriented paradigm are widely cited. At the same time, inspection is deemed to be the most cost-effective means of detecting defects in software products. Why then, is there no published experience, let alone quantitative data, on the application of inspection to object-oriented systems? This paper describes the facilities of the object-oriented paradigm and the issues that these raise when inspecting object-oriented code. Several problems are caused by the disparity between the static code structure and its dynamic runtime behaviour. The large number of small methods in object-oriented systems can also cause problems. This is followed by a description of three areas which may help mitigate problems found. Firstly, the use of various programming techniques may assist in making object-oriented code easier to inspect. Secondly, improved program documentation can help the inspector understand the code under inspection. Finally, tool support can help the inspector analyse the dynamic behaviour of the code. In conclusion, while both the object-oriented paradigm and inspection provide excellent benefits on their own, combining the two may be a difficult exercise, requiring extensive support if it is to be successful.