Software Inspection Research Articles

Enhancing human-machine pair inspection with risk number and code inspection diagram

Software inspection is a widely-used approach to software quality assurance. Human-Machine Pair Inspection (HMPI) is a novel software inspection technology proposed in our previous work, which is characterized by machine guiding programmers to inspect their own code during programming. While our previous studies have shown the effectiveness of HMPI in telling risky code fragments to the programmer, little attention has been paid to the issue of how the programmer can be effectively guided to carry out inspections. To address this important problem, in this paper we propose to combine Risk Number with Code Inspection Diagram (CID) to provide accurate guidance for the programmer to efficiently carry out inspections of his/her own programs. By following the Code Inspection Diagram, the programmer will inspect every checking item shown in the CID to efficiently determine whether it actually contain bugs. We describe a case study to evaluate the performance of this method by comparing its inspection time and number of detected errors with our previous work. The result shows that the method is likely to guide the programmer to inspect the faulty code earlier and be more efficient in detecting defects than the previous HMPI established based on Cognitive Complexity.

Intelligent Detection and Analysis of Software Vulnerabilities based on Encryption Algorithms and Feature Extraction

Implement status detection of ship software, identify the source of faults in problematic software, and release new software versions. Based on the above requirements, the author regards the detection and control of ship software status as the core research content. Based on the actual operating environment of ship software, the functional requirements of software status detection were studied and analyzed, and a set of ship software status detection was designed and implemented, a software inspection and maintenance platform that integrates ship software operation and maintenance, as well as ship software version release and update. The author conducted practical verification of the SM3 and SM2 hybrid encryption algorithm and selected software on the ship for detection. After analyzing the experimental results, it has been proven that using a hybrid algorithm for encryption and decryption, the server can accurately obtain software information on the ship's platform, detect the software status on the ship, and locate specific problem files. For software that does not meet the standard status, the server can accurately transmit software information to the ``component integration framework'' and put the component in a ``prohibited'' scheduling state. After the server repairs the problematic software, the detection results of the software change and display as legal, while the software is in the ``allowed'' scheduling state in the ``component integration framework''.

Enhancing Software Quality through Early-Phase of Software Verification and Validation Techniques

Purpose: The core objectives of this conducted research were threefold: first, to assess whether early-phase verification and validation (V&V)techniques, encompassing software design review, code review, and inspection, significantly contribute to defect prevention throughout the software development process; second, to evaluate the impact of these techniques on the efficiency of software development in terms of time, cost, and resource allocation; and third, to conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis between early-phase verification and validation (V&V)techniques and traditional post-development testing regarding their effectiveness in defect prevention and software quality improvement.
 Methodology: Employing an experimental approach, this study conducted case studies within Tanzanian software development organizations. Data were meticulously gathered through surveys and interviews involving software professionals. Both quantitative and qualitative data were systematically analyzed to ensure data reliability and ethical considerations.
 Findings: The research findings indicate that early-phase verification and validation (V&V) techniques shine as powerful tools for defect prevention, leading to a substantial reduction in defect counts and elevating software quality metrics, such as reliability and user satisfaction. Notably, these techniques demonstrated a favorable impact on software development efficiency by shortening development cycles and curtailing costs. When compared to traditional post-development testing, early-phase verification and validation (V&V) techniques consistently outperformed in the realm of defect prevention and software quality enhancement.
 Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: The study's outcomes underscore the transformative potential of early-phase verification &validation techniques, urging the software development industry to pivot from defect detection to defect prevention. The insights garnered here offer practical guidance for organizations aiming to streamline their software development processes, economize costs, and deliver top-notch software products that closely align with user expectations. While conducted in a Tanzanian context, these findings reverberate across the global software development landscape, underscoring the universal relevance of early-phase verification and validation (V&V) techniques as pivotal enablers of software quality assurance and operational efficiency.

RETRACTED: Pradeep et al. Express Data Processing on FPGA: Network Interface Cards for Streamlined Software Inspection for Packet Processing. Appl. Syst. Innov. 2023, 6, 9

The journal retracts the article “Express Data Processing on FPGA: Network Interface Cards for Streamlined Software Inspection for Packet Processing” [...]

Formalizing Attack Tree on Security Object for MySANi in Legal Metrology

Illegal software manipulation is one of the biggest issues in software security. This includes the legally relevant software which are now crucial modules in weight and measuring instruments such as weighbridges. Despite the advancement and complexity of weight and measuring instruments, the inspection methodology is weak and lacks of innovation. The conventional inspection method is merely based on the observation printed certificate of the software. This paper introduces Malaysia Software-Assisted Non-Automatic Weighing Instrument (NAWI) Inspection (MySANI), a method used to enhance the software inspection scheme in legal metrology. MySANI introduces security objects in order to assist and enhance the inspection process. The security evaluation is based on the best practices in IT in metrology, where the attack model on relevant assets of the security objects is simulated for the Attack Probability Tree. The attack tree is verified by integrating formal notation and comparison with finite state transition system domain to verify the correctness properties of the tree design before the model can be further used in a risk analysis procedure within the Attack Probability Tree framework. Results show that the designed attack tree is consistent with the designed simulation.

RETRACTED: Express Data Processing on FPGA: Network Interface Cards for Streamlined Software Inspection for Packet Processing

Modern computers’ network interface cards (NICs) are undergoing changes in order to handle greater data rates and assist with scaling problems caused by general-purpose CPU technology. The inclusion of programmable accelerators to the NIC’s data channel is one of the ongoing improvements that is particularly intriguing since it gives the accelerator the chance to take on a portion of the CPU’s network packet processing duties. Accelerators are frequently developed using platforms like field-programmable gate arrays because packet processing operations have severe latency requirements (FPGAs). When implementing packet processing activities, FPGAs’ gain for through put is the number of data packets being successfully sent per second and latency is the actual time those packets take. However, due to their restricted resources, programming may need to be shared throughout a variety of applications. We provide hXDP, a software solution for FPGAs that targets the Linux eXpress Data Path and performs packet processing functions outlined with the eBPF technology. While maintaining performance on par with top-tier CPUs, hXDP only uses a tiny portion from the field programmable gate arrays, which are semiconductor devices that are based around a matrix of configuration logic blocks (CLB) connected over programmable interconnects. However, we demonstrate that when aiming towards a purpose-built FPGA architecture, many extended Berkeley packet filters (eBPF) allow programmers to use Berkeley packet filter byte code that makes use of certain kernel resources and instruction set architecture, to collocate and even eliminate, with considerably productivity and effectiveness. On an FPGA NIC, we implement hXDP and test its effectiveness using authentic eBPF programmes from the real world. Our version consumes 15% of the FPGA resources and operates at 156.25 MHz. This can constantly change and lead to the act of identification, inspection, extraction, and manipulation so that a network may make more intelligent management decisions.

Evaluation of the Usability of the Immunization Information System in Brazil: A Mixed-Method Study.

Introduction: Usability is a quality attribute that can evaluate the ease of use of user interfaces, based on standards called usability heuristics. Objective: To evaluate the usability components of the Brazilian Immunization Information System (IIS), focusing on the users and their interaction and agility with the interfaces. Materials and Methods: It was a concomitant and convergent mixed-method study that used a cross-sectional design for the quantitative approach and the indirect method of heuristic evaluation for the qualitative approach. Participants were 137 nursing professionals working in vaccination rooms, who completed a structured questionnaire on standards of usability quality, and 4 specialists in information technology, who used a semistructured form to carry out a software inspection. Descriptive and inferential statistics and the heuristic inspection were used for the analyses. Results: The evaluation resulted in 10 violated heuristics and identified 14 usability problems on the 68 screens of the IIS. The system presented simple usability problems (grade 2 severity), which can be repaired, with a low correction priority. The heuristics best evaluated were error prevention (3.03 ± 0.54) and help and documentation (3.00 ± 0.68); and the worst evaluated was visibility of system status, with a mean of 2.62 ± 0.55. Professionals with a technical education level presented a higher score on the scales for the recognition rather than recall heuristic when compared with the nurses (2.77 ± 0.49 vs. 3.67 ± 0.66, p = 0.003). Conclusion: The system provides easy access for users, however, has weaknesses in its ability to allow the users to easily achieve their goals of interaction with the interface.

New Instrumented Trolleys and A Procedure for Automatic 3D Optical Inspection of Railways.

This paper focuses on new instrumented trolleys, allowing automated 3D inspection of railway infrastructures, using optical scanning principles and devices for defects and damage evaluation. Inspection of rolling components is crucial for wear evaluation and to schedule maintenance interventions to assure safety. Currently, inspection trolleys are mainly instrumented with 2D contact or optical sensors. The application of 3D non-contact digitizers proposed in this paper allows for a quick and more complete monitoring of the health conditions of railways, also in combination with a proper procedure for automatic 3D inspection. The results of the experimental tests using 3D portable optical scanners on railways are compared with results obtained by a trolley instrumented with 2D contact sensors. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the trolleys mounting 3D handheld optical digitizers with proper automated software inspection procedures.

A 3D Printed Ready-Mixed Concrete Power Distribution Substation: Materials and Construction Technology.

Currently, 3D concrete printing technology is not yet able to print ready-mixed concrete with coarse aggregates. Based on an independently developed 3D printing construction equipment system and optimized concrete materials, a 3D concrete printer that can directly print ready-mixed concrete is developed. This paper introduces the whole 3D printing process for one power distribution substation in detail, including the printing equipment, key software, concrete preparation, printing process, and construction inspection. This investigation will provide valuable design and construction experience for the future construction of 3D concrete printing.

Using Natural Language Processing and Graph Mining to Explore Inter- Related Requirements in Software Artefacts

Software development is prone to software faults due to the involvement of multiple stakeholders especially during the fuzzy phases (requirements and design). Software inspections are commonly used in industry to detect and fix problems in requirements and design artifacts thereby mitigating the fault propagation to later phases. The requirements documented in natural language (NL) are prone to contain faults because of different vocabularies among stakeholders. This research employs various NL processing with semantic analysis (SA) and mining solutions from graph theory to NL requirements to develop inter-related requirements (IRRs) that can help identify requirements that may need similar fixes. Additionally, our approach aims at aiding requirements' engineers with fault-prone regions both pre and post inspection. Pre-inspection, our approach using IRRs help removing redundant and extraneous faults within related requirements while post-inspection, it aids engineers analyse the impact of a change in one requirement on another related requirements. So, this research aims at developing a graph of inter-related requirements using natural language processing and semantic analysis approaches on a given requirements document that can be used to aid various decisions pre and post-inspections.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: The smell of fear: on the relation between test smells and flaky tests

Regression testing is the activity performed by developers to check whether new modifications have not introduced bugs. A crucial requirement to make regression testing effective is that test cases are deterministic. Unfortunately, this is not always the case as some tests might suffer from so-called flakiness, i.e., tests that exhibit both a passing and a failing outcome with the same code. Flaky tests are widely recognized as a serious issue, since they hide real bugs and increase software inspection costs. While previous research has focused on understanding the root causes of test flakiness and devising techniques that automatically fix them, in this paper we explore an orthogonal perspective: the relation between flaky tests and test smells, i.e., suboptimal development choices applied when developing tests. Relying on (1) an analysis of the state-of-the-art and (2) interviews with industrial developers, we first identify five flakiness-inducing test smell types, namely Resource Optimism, Indirect Testing, Test Run War, Fire and Forget, and Conditional Test Logic, and automate their detection. Then, we perform a large-scale empirical study on 19,532 JUnit test methods of 18 software systems, discovering that the five considered test smells causally co-occur with flaky tests in 75% of the cases. Furthermore, we evaluate the effect of refactoring, showing that it is not only able to remove design flaws, but also fixes all 75% flaky tests causally co-occurring with test smells.

A WEB-BASED MODEL FOR INSPECTION INCONSISTENCIES RESOLUTION: A NEW APPROACH WITH TWO CASE STUDIES

This research is aimed at introducing an enhanced inspection model known as Improved Software Inspection Model (ISIM) by making some enhancements to overcome or reduce the weaknesses identified in Formal model. ISIM includes a method of selecting suitable inspectors based on their expertise and work experience; provide a database that stores information on potentials; has a database that stores the possible causes of each of the defects stored in the defect database; and incorporates a few enhancements in the inspection process. To facilitate the selection of suitable inspectors and the inspection process, an inspection tool was developed using PHP with MySQL as database management system. To determine whether the use of ISIM can improve the inspection process, the quality of the process was evaluated using paired T-test which compares the differences between Formal and ISIM models, in terms of the number of defects detected, inspection time, and the productivity of the inspectors. Two case studies were conducted in two companies and inspections were carried out on two software development projects to collect the data needed for the statistical test. The statistical test results show that at ii = 0.05, the mean values of the number of defects are detected; the inspection time; and the productivity of the inspectors when using Formal and ISIM are 19.78 and 28.13; 220.97 minutes and 213.69 minutes; and 0.0891 and 0.1328, respectively. This shows that there are significant improvements in the number of defects detected (i.e. difference = 8.35; 42.21%), and productivity of the inspectors (i.e. difference = 0.0437; 49.05%). However, there is only a slight improvement in the inspection time. It can be concluded that ISIM together with its tool improve the quality of inspection process in the two case studies.

Software inspections: comparing a formal method based with a classical reading methodology

In this paper, we present a rigorous comparison of two inspection techniques: our formal method-based approach, SOLIMVA 3.0, with a set of Object-Oriented Reading Techniques (OORTs). We evaluated efficiency (required time to analyse a scenario) and effectiveness (ability to find defects within UML diagrams). Results show that the classical OORT methodology is more efficient than SOLIMVA. However, we found a strong positive correlation between the required time by using OORT and SOLIMVA. For effectiveness, in general, both methodologies presented the same performance. However, SOLIMVA detected more inconsistency (incorrectness and extra information), ambiguity, and partial incompleteness defects while OORT identified more total incompleteness. Our overall conclusion is that a classical reading methodology (OORT) and a formal-based one (SOLIMVA) can be adopted in a complementary way within a software inspection process. While OORT is less costly to apply, SOLIMVA can be used to address some specific types of defects.

Software inspections: comparing a formal method based with a classical reading methodology

In this paper, we present a rigorous comparison of two inspection techniques: our formal method-based approach, SOLIMVA 3.0, with a set of Object-Oriented Reading Techniques (OORTs). We evaluated efficiency (required time to analyse a scenario) and effectiveness (ability to find defects within UML diagrams). Results show that the classical OORT methodology is more efficient than SOLIMVA. However, we found a strong positive correlation between the required time by using OORT and SOLIMVA. For effectiveness, in general, both methodologies presented the same performance. However, SOLIMVA detected more inconsistency (incorrectness and extra information), ambiguity, and partial incompleteness defects while OORT identified more total incompleteness. Our overall conclusion is that a classical reading methodology (OORT) and a formal-based one (SOLIMVA) can be adopted in a complementary way within a software inspection process. While OORT is less costly to apply, SOLIMVA can be used to address some specific types of defects.

Framework for Software Code Reviews and Inspections in a Classroom Environment

Framework for Software Code Reviews and Inspections in a Classroom Environment

VOLATILE REQUIREMENT IDENTIFICATION: AN IMPLEMENTATION OF PERSPECTIVE BASED INSPECTION TECHNIQUES

Inspection is a best known way of detecting defects in SRS [1]. Software Inspection was initially created for source code. However, it was later extended to be used for the various software life cycle products such as design design & requirements specification. The key characteristics of a software project are requirements. Requirements keep on changing throughout the life cycle of a project [2]. These changing requirements are popularly known as volatile requirements. If not resolved these volatile requirements can be very dangerous. They should be detected in earlier phases of software development life cycle. In this paper an inspection technique is proposed that uses perspective based reading [3] for detecting these volatile requirements.

Defect Types and Software Inspection Techniques: A Systematic Mapping Study

Software inspection has been used to guarantee and control the quality of products by detecting defects, which can be spread out throughout the entire software life cycle. Therefore, the main premise is to identify and reduce the number of defect types in software artifacts during inspections. This work focuses on providing an up to dated overview of existing defects in the context of software inspection techniques. A systematic mapping was carried out, from which 2096 primary studies were retrieved and 32 were final selected. From the analysis, classification and aggregation of the retrieved studies, important different defect types were identified. Most studies encompass defect types by means of experiments and proposed techniques and approaches. Thus, as a main result, the identification of several different studies with distinct proposals concerned on defect types is evident. Although researchers have conducted studies over time, a general pattern on the detection of defects could not be established. Therefore, the scenario in which this study was carried out provides researchers with the capability of conducting further research in a motivating and challenging research topic, as well as practitioners with the adoption of empirically evaluated inspection techniques and respective defect types.

Towards machine learned quality control: A benchmark for sharpness quantification in digital pathology

Pathology is on the verge of a profound change from an analog and qualitative to a digital and quantitative discipline. This change is mostly driven by the high-throughput scanning of microscope slides in modern pathology departments, reaching tens of thousands of digital slides per month. The resulting vast digital archives form the basis of clinical use in digital pathology and allow large scale machine learning in computational pathology.One of the most crucial bottlenecks of high-throughput scanning is quality control (QC). Currently, digital slides are screened manually to detected out-of-focus regions, to compensate for the limitations of scanner software.We present a solution to this problem by introducing a benchmark dataset for blur detection, an in-depth comparison of state-of-the art sharpness descriptors and their prediction performance within a random forest framework. Furthermore, we show that convolution neural networks, like residual networks, can be used to train blur detectors from scratch. We thoroughly evaluate the accuracy of feature based and deep learning based approaches for sharpness classification (99.74% accuracy) and regression (MSE 0.004) and additionally compare them to domain experts in a comprehensive human perception study. Our pipeline outputs spacial heatmaps enabling to quantify and localize blurred areas on a slide. Finally, we tested the proposed framework in the clinical setting and demonstrate superior performance over the state-of-the-art QC pipeline comprising commercial software and human expert inspection by reducing the error rate from 17% to 4.7%.

Herramienta software para inspección termográfica usando fusión multimodal de imágenes térmicas y de espectro visible

Monocular cameras are commonly used in communication devices, entertainment, and industrial environments since they allow people to recognize rapidly scenes and objects. On the other hand, thermal cameras are mostly known in industrial environments to visualize the objects’ thermic radiance but they lose their visual details. This work presents the design and implementation of a thermography inspection tool – INVIfusion – to fuse infrared and visual spectrum images. This tool includes three modules: image acquisition and calibration module, multimodal image fusion module, and report generation module. The main contribution of this work compared with other software inspection tools is INVIfusion supports cameras from different manufacturers (infrared and visible spectrum), having different field of view and spatial resolutions. To validate the suggested system’s functionality and accuracy, quantitative and qualitative tests were performed considering different camera configurations. In all cases the thermal camera was a FLIR E320. Quantitative tests were performed measuring the mean symmetric re-projection error obtaining a maximum error of 2.08 ± 1.8 pixels.

Software Inspections and Their Role in Software Quality Assurance

In this paper we will analyse the software inspections related published data of different successful companies. We will compare the impact of software inspections on software quality with other software quality assurance techniques like software tests etc. Our analysis will show that software inspections play the most important role in software quality assurance. We will also briefly discuss what the Software Inspections are; the benefits of Software Inspections; The team structure in a formal inspection; and the activities in an inspection process. We will also discuss the future of Software Inspections.