Assisting Asynchronous Software Inspection by Auto-Collation of Defect Lists

Software inspection is well known as an effective means of defect detection. Recent research in inspection has considered the application of tool support, with the intention of’further improving inspection efficiency. An expensive component of the inspection process is the group meeting,where individual defect lists are collated into a single master list. Performing this collation automatically could reduce the length of the group meeting,or contribute towards its replacement by an asynchronous or meetingless inspection. This paper describes a means of automatically collating multiple defect lists into a single list,while removing duplicates. An experiment investigating a simple technique is also described,making use of defects lists generated by subjects in previous controlled experiments. This experiment demonstrates that an automatic collation mechanism is feasible and provides a sound basis for further work in this area.