Software inspection is an effective way to assess product quality and to reduce the number of defects. In a software inspection, the inspection meeting is a key activity to agree on collated defects, to eliminate false positives, and to disseminate knowledge among the team members. However, inspection meetings often require high effort and may lose defects found in earlier inspection steps due to ineffective meeting techniques. Only few tools are available for this task. We have thus been developing a set of groupware tools to lower the effort of inspection meetings and to increase their efficiency. We conducted an experiment in an academic environment with 37 subjects to empirically investigate the effect of groupware tool support for inspection meetings. The main findings of the experiment are that tool support considerably lowered the meeting effort, supported inspectors in identifying false positives, and reduced the number of true defects lost.

Decision-making is a complex and important task in software engineering. The current state-of-the-practice is rather non-systematic as it typically relies upon personal judgment and experience without using explicit models. Empirical studies can help but they are costly to conduct and, to some extent, context dependent. Typically it is not efficient or even possible to conduct empirical studies for a large number of context parameter variations. Process simulation offers decision support as well, but currently suffers from a lack of empirical knowledge on the determinants of underlying system dynamics. In this paper we present an assessment of empirical knowledge and simulation techniques for the area of quality assurance planning. There is a strong interdependency between process simulation and empirical models for decision-making in this area: (a) profound empirical knowledge enables process simulation to support decision-making, and (b) the analysis of simulation results can point out situations and factors for which conducting empirical studies would be most worthwhile. This paper discusses critically some of the most important challenges for decision-making in the area of quality assurance planning.

Inspection is an effective but also expensive quality assurance activity to find defects early during software development. The defect detection process, team size, and staff hours invested can have a considerable impact on the defect detection effectiveness and cost-benefit of an inspection. In this paper, we use empirical data and a probabilistic model to estimate this impact for nominal (noncommunicating) inspection teams in an experiment context. Further, the analysis investigates how cutting off the inspection after a certain time frame would influence inspection performance. Main findings of the investigation are: 1) Using combinations of different reading techniques in a team is considerably more effective than using the best single technique only (regardless of the observed level of effort). 2) For optimizing the inspection performance, determining the optimal process mix in a team is more important than adding an inspector (above a certain team size) in our model. 3) A high level of defect detection effectiveness is much more costly to achieve than a moderate level since the average cost for the defects found by the inspector last added to a team increases more than linearly with growing effort investment. The work provides an initial baseline of inspection performance with regard to process diversity and effort in inspection teams. We encourage further studies on the topic of time usage with defect detection techniques and its effect on inspection effectiveness in a variety of inspection contexts to support inspection planning with limited resources.

A modern software development process framework, such as the unified process, is able to overcome problems of past frameworks, e.g., structural mismatches (notation, method used) between the products in different process steps. Moreover, it promotes an industry standard, which yields instantly tangible benefits from better communication in development teams and further secures investments in development methods based on such a standard. We describe the concept of a one-year undergraduate course in SE based on the unified process and elaborate why, where and how the unified process can be incorporated into the course. The students' response to the process was very positive. We argue that the unified process (UP) qualifies very well for being taught to SE students, as it integrates and extends essential SE practices. Another key argument for applying the UP was to integrate the different aspects and topics covered in the SE course and embedding them into a single structured and systematic SE process. By doing so students develop a much better understanding of the relationships and interactions between different models, analysis steps and techniques.

Decision-making is a complex and important task in software engineering. The current state-of-the-practice is rather non-systematic as it typically relies upon personal experience without using explicit models. Empirical studies can help but are to some extent context dependent and costly to conduct. Typically it is not efficient or even possible to conduct empirical studies for a large number of context parameter variations. We propose to build on a set of systematic empirical studies to fill gaps in context variable space with simulation: (a) Simulation can use the empirical results from different contexts and apply them to a planning situation as appropriate. (b) The analysis of simulation results can point out situations and factors for which conducting empirical studies would be most worthwhile. This paper presents a general decision model, a simulation framework, and examples for different decisions to use V&V activities in software development (e.g., under which conditions is a V&V activity, such as a re-inspection, worthwhile) to demonstrate practical applications of the general model.

After a software inspection the project manager has to decide whether a product has sufficient quality to pass on to the next software development stage or whether a second inspection cycle, a reinspection, is likely to sufficiently improve its quality. The reinspection decision of recent research focused on the estimation of product quality after inspection, which does not take in to account the effect of a reinspection. Thus we propose to use estimation models for the quality improvement during reinspection and the cost and benefit of a reinspection as basis for the reinspection decision. We evaluate the reinspection decision correctness of these models with time-stamped defect data from a large-scale controlled experiment on the inspection and reinspection of a software requirements document. The main finding of the investigation is that the product quality criterion is likely to force products to be reinspected, if a large number of defects were detected in the first inspection. Further the product-quality, criterion is especially sensitive to an underestimation of the number of defects in the product and will let bad products pass as good. The cost-benefit criterion is less sensitive to estimation error than the product-quality criterion and should in practice be used as second opinion, if a product-quality criterion is applied.

The inspection of early life-cycle artifacts such as requirement documents promises great benefits. However, research demonstrates that the inspection process is complex and expensive and that tool support would be highly desirable. Existing inspection tools focus largely on the inspection of source code. We have therefore devised groupware support for inspecting requirements. Based on our experience with adopting a group support system (GSS) for requirements negotiation, we decided to tailor this commercial GSS to support inspection of requirements. The paper discusses our concept of a Groupware-supported Requirements Inspection Process (GRIP) and shows that tailoring a COTS GSS works well to automate this process.