The impact of time controlled reading on software inspection effectiveness and efficiency: a controlled experiment

Abstract

Reading techniques help to guide reviewers during individual software inspections. In this experiment, we completely transfer the principle of statistical usage testing to inspection reading techniques for the first time. Statistical usage testing relies on a usage profile to determine how intensively certain parts of the system shall be tested from the users' perspective. Usage-based reading applies statistical usage testing principles by utilizing prioritized use cases as a driver for inspecting software artifacts (e.g., design). In order to reflect how intensively certain use cases should be inspected, time budgets are introduced to usage-based reading where a maximum inspection time is assigned to each use case. High priority use cases receive more time than low priority use cases. A controlled experiment is conducted with 23 Software Engineering M.Sc. students inspecting a design document. In this experiment, usage-based reading without time budgets is compared with time controlled usage-based reading. The result of the experiment is that time budgets do not significantly improve inspection performance. In conclusion, it is sufficient to only use prioritized use cases to successfully transfer statistical usage testing to inspections.