Abstract
The inadequate and late removal of defects continues to be a major problem in today's software industry. One of the proposed solutions for addressing this problem is software inspection. However, despite the large body of inspection experience, there is still a need for further work on the question of how to organize a single inspection and how to provide technical support for the defect detection activity. This thesis presents the architecture-centric approach for inspection organization and introduces the Perspective-based Reading (PBR) technique to support defect detection. The results of three empirical studies suggest that PBR in conjunction with the architecture-centric strategy increases the cost-effectiveness of existing inspection implementations.