Analysis of the impact of reading technique and inspector capability on individual inspection performance

Inspection of software documents is an effective quality assurance measure to detect defects in the early stages of software development. It can provide timely feedback on product quality to both developers and managers. This paper reports on a controlled experiment that investigated the influence of reading techniques and inspector capability on individual effectiveness to find given sets of defects in a requirements specification document. Experimental results support the hypothesis that reading techniques can direct inspectors' attention towards inspection targets, i.e. on specific document parts or severity levels, which enables inspection planners to divide the inspection work among several inspectors. Further, they suggest a tradeoff between specific and general detection effectiveness regarding document coverage and inspection effort. Inspector capability plays a significant role in inspection performance, while the size of the effect varies with the reading technique employed and the inspected document part.