Assessing the quality impact of design inspections

Inspections are widely used and studies have found them to be effective in uncovering defects. However, there is less data available regarding the impact of inspections on different defect types and almost no data quantifying the link between inspections and desired end product qualities. This paper addresses this issue by investigating whether design inspection checklists can be tailored so as to effectively target certain defect types without impairing the overall defect detection rate. The results show that the design inspection approach used here does uncover useful design quality issues and that the checklists can be effectively tailored for some types of defects.