Empirical Evaluations of Usage-Based Reading and Fault Content Estimation for Software Inspections

Abstract: Empirical evaluations in software engineering are important in order to build a body of knowledge of methods that work in different environments. This thesis presents six empirical investigations of two techniques applied to software inspections, namely reading techniques and fault content estimation techniques. The first part of the thesis presents a series of experiments of a novel reading technique called usage-based reading. The objective of usage-based reading is to focus the inspection effort on the users’ employment of the software. This is achieved by applying prioritized use cases during inspection, which makes the reviewers more focused on the important parts of the software artefact during fault detection. The second part investigates fault content estimation applied to the software inspection process. The estimation methods used are capture-recapture and curve fitting. The objective of these methods is to estimate the number of remaining faults after an inspection. The information gained from fault content estimators is useful to control the quality of the software throughout the development. The main results of this thesis are that usage-based reading is an efficient reading technique, and that fault content estimators are worthwhile to integrate into the software inspection process. Usage-based reading is in particular valuable for software organizations that want to focus software inspections on improving the satisfaction of the users. Fault content estimation provides useful information for software managers in order to improve the quality of software products.