Team-based fault content estimation in the software inspection process

Abstract

The main objective of software inspection is to detect faults within a software artifact. This helps to reduce the number of faults and to increase the quality of a software product. However, although inspections have been performed with great success, and although the quality of the product is increased, it is difficult to estimate the quality. During the inspection process, attempts with objective estimations as well as with subjective estimations have been made. These methods estimate the fault content after an inspection and give a hint of the quality of the product. This paper describes an experiment conducted throughout the inspection process, where the purpose is to compare the estimation methods at different points. The experiment evaluates team estimates from subjective and objective fault content estimation methods integrated with the software inspection process. The experiment was conducted at two different universities with 82 reviewers. The result shows that objective estimates outperform subjective when point and confidence intervals are used. This contradicts the previous studies in the area.