Checklist-based Reading Research Articles

Experimental Study on Checklist-Based and Perspective-Based Requirements Reading Techniques using E-Review Tool

Software Requirements Review (SRR) is a formal review process in which several reviewers read all or parts of the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) to look for defects in the requirements. During requirements review sessions, reviewers may employ various reading techniques to ensure that the requirements have been completely and clearly specified. To review an SRS document, the review leader must organise a review session, the reviewers must physically meet and provide their review feedback during the session. In these situations, the review leader must schedule the review session based on the reviewers' availability, which can be laborious and time-consuming to arrange. Additionally, the review leader needs to manually consolidate all the outcomes of the review session, which could also require a considerable amount of effort and time. However, there has been insufficient research to identify the effectiveness of reading techniques for requirement reviews by employing a dedicated tool support for requirements review. Using a web-based application, called e-Review, the aim of this study is to experiment the effectiveness of Checklist-based Reading (CBR) and Perspective-based Reading (PBR) techniques during requirements review session.

Design and Development of the e-Review

Requirements review is a formal review process in which several reviewers read all or part of software requirement specification (SRS) and search for defects. In order to ensure that the system requirements have been completely and clearly identified, reviewers use many different review techniques. Despite of the availability of many reading techniques such as perspective-based reading techniques, checklist-based reading techniques and a few more, we could not find any existing tool to support two or more reading techniques in order to guide reviewer while reviewing a document. Besides, currently, in order for the reviewers to review an SRS document, they need to gather physically, make a session and give their review feedback during the session. In such cases, the requirement engineers need to schedule the review session based on the availability of the reviewers. The review leader needs to manually organize the session and review outcomes also need to be manually consolidated. Thus, the objectives of this project are to develop a web-based tool in order to; (1) enable reviewers to review SRS document using two different reviewing techniques such as checklist-based reading (CBR) and perspective-based reading (PBR); (2) enable review leader to assign reviewer for requirement review; and (3) allow compilation of the review feedback to be generated. The project applied Iterative process model to manage the software development process. The implementation of the project is using PHP JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JQuery, and Ajax

An Experimental Study on Checklist-Based and Perspective-Based Requirements Reading Techniques Using E-Review Tool

Software Requirements Review (SRR) is a formal review process in which several reviewers read all or parts of the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) to look for defects in the requirements. During requirements review sessions, reviewers may employ various reading techniques to ensure that the requirements have been completely and clearly specified. To review an SRS document, the review leader must organise a review session, the reviewers must physically meet and provide their review feedback during the session. In these situations, the review leader must schedule the review session based on the reviewers' availability, which can be laborious and time-consuming to arrange. Additionally, the review leader needs to manually consolidate all the outcomes of the review session, which could also require a considerable amount of effort and time. However, there has been an insufficient research to identify the effectiveness of reading techniques for requirement reviews by employing a dedicated tool support for requirements review. Using a web-based application, called e-Review, the aim of this study is to experiment the effectiveness of Checklist-based Reading (CBR) and Perspective-based Reading (PBR) techniques during requirements review session.

On Empirical Comparison of Checklist-based Reading and Adhoc Reading for Code Inspection

nspection is a proven approach that is commonly used to manage software quality. To this end many inspection techniques such as Checklist-Based Reading (CBR), Perspective-Based Reading (PBR), Usage-Based Reading (UBR), and Defect-Based Reading (DBR) have been proposed in the literature. Unfortunately, plethora of empirical studies carried out to evaluate these reading techniques have produced inconsistent and conflicting results. Consequently, ad hoc reading and CBR still remain the standard reading techniques in software organizations. This paper investigates the performance of ad hoc and CBR techniques in a traditional paper-based environment. Seventeen undergraduate students of computer science majority of whom are in their final year were used as subjects in a controlled experiment. Results of the experiment indicate that CBR is significantly superior to ad hoc reading in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, effort, and number of false positives. On the average, 4 faults were detected in 69 minutes using ad hoc reading while 11 faults were detected in 42.5 minutes using Checklist-based reading. Also the average number of false positive is about 3.13 in checklist-based approach as against about 6.44 in ad hoc approach.

Assessing defect detection performance of interacting teams in object-oriented design inspection

Software inspection is one of the methods to ensure the quality of software by finding and repairing defect early in software development process. In a software inspection process, inspectors first review software artifacts individually and then meet in a team in order to find as many defects as possible and to eliminate false positives. However, several empirical studies suggest that inspection meeting may not be necessary since an insignificant number of new defects are found as a result of the meeting. In this paper we report on a controlled experiment with 54 undergraduate students who inspection Object-Oriented design documents. Firstly, we compare the performance of inspection teams using two reading techniques: Checklist-Based Reading (CBR) and Perspective-Based Reading (PBR). Secondly, we compare the performance of interacting and nominal teams. The results of comparison between CBR and PBR do not reveal a significant difference between these techniques. Meanwhile, the results of comparison between interacting and nominal teams show that interacting teams do not detect a significant number of new defects during a meeting, and they are less effective than nominal teams; however interacting teams reported fewer false positives as compared to nominal teams.

An experimental comparison of usage-based and checklist-based reading

Software quality can be defined as the customers' perception of how a system works. Inspection is a method to monitor and control the quality throughout the development cycle. Reading techniques applied to inspections help reviewers to stay focused on the important parts of an artifact when inspecting. However, many reading techniques focus on finding as many faults as possible, regardless of their importance. Usage-based reading helps reviewers to focus on the most important parts of a software artifact from a user's point of view. We present an experiment, which compares usage-based and checklist-based reading. The results show that reviewers applying usage-based reading are more efficient and effective in detecting the most critical faults from a user's point of view than reviewers using checklist-based reading. Usage-based reading may be preferable for software organizations that utilize or start utilizing use cases in their software development.

Further investigations of reading techniques for object-oriented design inspection

This paper describes an experimental evaluation of two reading techniques, namely Checklist-based reading (CBR) and Perspective-based reading (PBR) for Object-Oriented (OO) design document, written using the notation of Unified Modelling Language, inspection. Inspections are usually applied for defect detection in requirement documents or code modules, and there is a significant lack of information how inspections should be applied to OO design documents. The paper reports on a controlled experiment with 59 subject students to compare CBR and PBR techniques with respect to individual time spent on inspection, cost per defect, effectiveness, and 3-person simulated team effectiveness.

Usage-based reading—an experiment to guide reviewers with use cases

Reading methods for software inspections are used for aiding reviewers to focus on special aspects in a software artefact. Many experiments were conducted for checklist-based reading and scenario-based reading concluding that the focus is important for software reviewers. This paper describes and evaluates a reading technique called usage-based reading (UBR). UBR utilises prioritised use cases to guide reviewers through an inspection. More importantly, UBR drives the reviewers to focus on the software parts that are most important for a user. An experiment was conducted on 27 third year Bachelor's software engineering students, where one group used use cases sorted in a prioritised order and the control group used randomly ordered use cases. The main result is that reviewers in the group with prioritised use cases are significantly more efficient and effective in detecting the most critical faults from a user's point of view. Consequently, UBR has the potential to become an important reading technique. Future extensions to the reading technique are suggested and experiences gained from the experiment to support replications are provided.

An internally replicated quasi-experimental comparison of checklist and perspective based reading of code documents

The basic premise of software inspections is that they detect and remove defects before they propagate to subsequent development phases where their detection and correction cost escalates. To exploit their full potential, software inspections must call for a close and strict examination of the inspected artifact. For this, reading techniques for defect detection may be helpful since these techniques tell inspection participants what to look for and, more importantly, how to scrutinize a software artifact in a systematic manner. Recent research efforts investigated the benefits of scenario-based reading techniques. A major finding has been that these techniques help inspection teams find more defects than existing state-of-the-practice approaches, such as, ad-hoc or checklist-based reading (CBR). We experimentally compare one scenario-based reading technique, namely, perspective-based reading (PBR), for defect detection in code documents with the more traditional CBR approach. The comparison was performed in a series of three studies, as a quasi experiment and two internal replications, with a total of 60 professional software developers at Bosch Telecom GmbH. Meta-analytic techniques were applied to analyze the data.

An experimental comparison of reading techniques for defect detection in UML design documents

The basic motivation for software inspections is to detect and remove defects before they propagate to subsequent development phases where their detection and removal become more expensive. To maximize this potential, the examination of the artefact under inspection must be as thorough and detailed as possible. This implies the need for systematic reading techniques that tell inspection participants what to look for and, more importantly, how to scrutinize a software document. Recent research efforts have investigated the benefits of scenario-based reading techniques for defect detection in functional requirements and functional code documents. A major finding has been that these techniques help inspection teams find more defects than existing state-of-the-art approaches, such as, ad hoc or checklist-based reading (CBR). In this paper, we describe and experimentally compare one scenario-based reading technique, namely perspective-based reading (PBR), for defect detection in object-oriented design documents using the notation of the unified modeling language (UML) to the more traditional CBR approach. The comparison was performed in a controlled experiment with 18 practitioners as subjects. Our results indicate that PBR teams discovered, on average, 58% of the defects and had an average cost per defect ratio of 56 min per defect. In this way, PBR is more effective than CBR (i.e., it resulted in inspection teams detecting, on average, 41% more unique defects than CBR). Moreover, the cost of defect detection using PBR is significantly lower than CBR (i.e., PBR exhibits, on average, a 58% cost per defect improvement over CBR). This study therefore provides evidence demonstrating the efficacy of PBR scenarios for defect detection in UML design documents. In addition, it demonstrates that a PBR inspection is a promising approach for improving the quality of models developed using the UML notation.