Up for Review?

A final caution relates to the roles to be played in the inspection process. IBM's AMS project manager, quality assurance, Joji Vergara says one of the successes of the inspection process is that it gives you a very rigorous framework to remove defects. To achieve those benefits it is vital to train the organization on what these inspections process.

"For each of the roles that are selected in each inspection - you've got a moderator, a designer, technical writers, you also have performance measurement representatives when they are needed - each of these have got specific responsibilities that would dissuade people from the objective of a review. So you have to remember that for each of these participants you have to be very clear about the reasons why they were invited to participate in that review," Vergara says.

"I have conducted classroom training face-to-face and run workshops with them so as to give them hands-on exercises, and that is the only way they can actually put themselves in the shoes of an author or a moderator. I don't think this can be achieved by just reading the project documents.

"And that requires a cultural change," Vergara says, "because everyone has got to accept that their code or their product is being reviewed and accept that in an open manner.

"That's why I think that the CIO should be very clear on what the business driver is. The business driver is cost and quality and that's got to be understood by the whole organization. There will be some changes in how they will deal with everything that they do."

SIDEBAR: The Habits of Highly Effective Developers

• Prepare three separate time and cost estimates based on past experience, software functionality and a formal estimating technique, and compare actual results with predictions

• Adopt a standard notation scheme and methodology for design and coding

• Automate control of the development process and link it to a project-management tool

• Use joint application design for requirements analysis

• Practice iterative development and time-boxing

• Institute a formal change-request process to prevent scope creep

• Establish centres of excellence-encourage the development of specialists in each development procedure

• Measure productivity and defect removal

• Employ component-based development

• Establish clean-room techniques for component building

• Institute version control and configuration management

• Design and test for usability

• Practice code inspections and walk-throughs

  SIDEBAR: On Closer Inspection

  Karl Wiegers, principal consultant with US organization Process Impact, says he believes inspections are most valuable in the following cases.

  • Because you need to remove as many defects as possible from the work product.

  • When improving or assessing the quality of work products that cannot be executed, such as requirements specifications. Wiegers believes inspection of requirements specs is the highest leverage quality practice available to the software industry.

  • It Is important to identify ambiguities, differences in understanding and other problems that individuals do not spot because of tunnel vision.

  • When dealing with high-risk work products that either have a high probability of containing defects or in which defects could have serious consequences.

    "It's hard to say when they [inspections] are least valuable or what limitations they impose," Wiegers says. "This is very situationally dependent. It's not really a question of being 'least valuable' or limited, so much as a matter of which quality practices are most appropriate in a given situation."

    For instance Wiegers says inspections will not be valuable if the participants do not know what they are doing, have not been trained, do not spend the time to examine the material prior to an inspection meeting or do a superficial job of looking for defects. Inspections will also be little help if the wrong people take part, if participants simply read through the work product instead of really analyzing it, or if they (or their managers) ignore the results (for example, do not correct the defects discovered).

    "Inspections are not an appropriate substitute for using tools, such as compilers and static code analyzer tools, that can find certain types of defects much faster," Wiegers says. "But those tools will never find errors like incorrect logic, missing or misinterpreted requirements, inefficient designs or flawed test cases. The human eyeball and brain work best for these sorts of problems, and inspection is a good way to do it."

    Inspections are not free, Wiegers points out, nor even cheap, but that should not necessarily be considered a limitation, considering the cost of undiscovered defects and compared to the cost and effectiveness of other defect-removal practices, such as various types of testing.

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