Building resource and quality management models for software inspections

Inspection of software development artifacts have become an integral part of software quality improvement. However, experience tells us that inspection effectiveness (i.e., its capability to find defects) and efficiency (i.e., its cost-effectiveness) vary significantly across organizations or, even more striking, from one inspection to the other in a given organization. Thus, we investigate in this paper the variations across inspections at one of our customers' sites. By measuring and modelling their inspection processes, we identified some of the important factors that have an impact on effectiveness and efficiency and that can explain most of their variation. The models we developed show that exponential relationships exist between the inspected document size, the effort spent on preparation, and the resulting effectiveness and efficiency. Moreover, these models appear to make accurate predictions (a goodness of fit of R 2 =0.68 and R 2 =0.89 for effectiveness and efficiency, respec tively). We show how they can be practically used for inspection resource planning, quality control, evaluation, and improvement.