ON EMPIRICAL COMPARISON OF CHECKLIST-BASED READING AND ADHOC READING FOR CODE INSPECTION

Abstract

Software inspection is a necessary tool for software quality assurance. To this end a number of inspection techniques have been proposed in the literature with the ad hoc and Checklist-Based Reading (CBR) being the most widely used. This paper investigates the performance of ad hoc and CBR techniques in a traditional paper-based environment. Seventeen undergraduate students of computer science most of whom are in their final year were used as subjects in the 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.