ASSISTing management decisions in the software inspection process

Software inspection is a valuable technique for detecting defects in the products of software development. One avenue of research concerns the development of computer support tools that will hopefully lead to even greater improvements to the software inspection process. A number of prototype systems have been developed, but to date all suffer from some fundamental limitations. One of the most serious of these concerns is the lack of facilities to monitor the inspection process, and thereby to provide the moderator with quantitative information on the performance of the process. This paper commences by briefly describing work undertaken at Strathclyde into research in the area of computer support for software inspection (ASSIST). It then outlines a measurement component based on capture-recapture techniques that has been introduced into the system to aid the moderator in making a decision on when to terminate the inspection process. Finally, an evaluation of different capture-recapture models is presented, using data collected from software inspection experiments, demonstrating that the approach is viable and can make a contribution to improving performance.