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In software development, stakeholders usually collaborate asynchronously by sharing artifacts. Traceability system links artifacts and henceforth offers assist collaboration among system requirements. Various stakeholders show their interest towards various kinds of traceability and system requirements. With analysis towards various investigations, system requirements have to be fulfilled by prioritizing tasks. However, it is extremely complex to maintain or fulfil system requirements. But, none of the background investigations have been analyzed with heuristic based requirement traversing. This work investigates traversing of users’ functional requirements with Meta-heuristic approach termed as adaptive optimization and with optimal priority scheduling. With the assistance of traceability concept, functional requirements, design, test artifacts, defects, code inspection and system construction are considered and come under maintenance phase. It is also essential to analyze huge industrial firms to depict link and traceability types. Traceability deals with relationship among requirements, their source and system design. Bi-directional traceability, which deals with various associated requirements enables user to find origin of requirements and track every changes that are made to the requirements. The foremost goal of this work is to establish traceability links to provide support for decision making, to resolve inconsistency problem and to demonstrate quality requirements with improved system lifetime. The anticipated model shows better trade-off in contrast to prevailing models.

Context: Fault localization is among the most expensive tasks in software development. Spectrum-based fault localization (SFL) techniques seek to pinpoint faulty program elements (e.g., statements), by sorting them only by their suspiciousness scores. Developers tend to fall back on another debugging strategy if they do not find the bug in the first positions of a suspiciousness list. Objective: In this study, we assess techniques to contextualize code inspection whose goal is two-fold: to provide guidance during fault localization, and to improve the effectiveness of SFL techniques in classifying bugs within the first picks. Code Hierarchy (CH) and Integration Coverage-based Debugging (ICD) techniques provide a search roadmap —a list of methods—that guide the developer toward faults. CH assigns a method with the highest suspiciousness score of its blocks, and ICD captures method call relationships from testing to establish the roadmap. Two new filtering strategies— Fixed Budget (FB) and Level Score (LS)—are combined with ICD and CH for reducing the amount of blocks to inspect in each method. Method: We evaluated the effectiveness of ICD, CH, FB, LS, and a suspiciousness block list (BL) on 62 bugs from 7 real programs. Results: ICD and CH using FB found more faults inspecting less blocks than BL with statistical significance. More than 50% of the faults were found inspecting at most 10 blocks using ICD-FB and CH-FB. Moreover, ICD and CH located 70% of the faults by inspecting, at most, 4 methods. Conclusions: These results suggest that the contextualization provided by roadmaps and filtering strategies is useful for guiding developers toward faults and improves the performance of SFL techniques.

In the past decade, brain and autonomic nervous system activity measurement received increasing attention in the study of software engineering (SE). This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) to survey the existing NeuroSE literature. Based on a rigorous search protocol, we identified 89 papers (hereafter denoted as NeuroSE papers). We analyzed these papers to develop a comprehensive understanding of who had published NeuroSE research and classified the contributions according to their type. The 47 articles presenting completed empirical research were analyzed in detail. The SLR revealed that the number of authors publishing NeuroSE research is still relatively small. The thematic focus so far has been on code comprehension, while code inspection, programming, and bug fixing have been less frequently studied. NeuroSE publications primarily used methods related to brain activity measurement (particularly fMRI and EEG), while methods related to the measurement of autonomic nervous system activity (e.g., pupil dilation, heart rate, skin conductance) received less attention. We also present details of how the empirical research was conducted, including stimuli and independent and dependent variables, and discuss implications for future research. The body of NeuroSE literature is still small. Yet, high quality contributions exist constituting a valuable basis for future studies.

Specific features of software for computer aided inspection are detailed.Six commercial software packages are tested and compared through a fuzzy AHP analysis.GD&T functions and algorithms are not mature yet to provide consistent results.More expensive software with advanced features provide higher performances.The freeware Gom Inspect is a valid choice for basic inspection activities. Industrial metrology of mechanical components has been facing a gradual revolution recently through the application of contactless 3D scanners in computer aided inspection. Following the industrial trend and request, new modules for quality control activities on scan data have been integrated in reverse engineering software packages.The aim of this work is to propose a structured methodology for the screening and comparison of reverse engineering programs that are suitable for inspection activities. Specific features that distinguish this kind of software are described and detailed. Six different commercial software are tested using invariant scan data from a reference part that was specifically designed for inspection purposes.The selected packages are then compared by means of a multicriteria fuzzy AHP analysis that considers quantitative and qualitative criteria. The criteria were grouped into three categories related with the user, the vendor and the technical requirements. Two different scenarios are considered for the choice of the software that best suits to computer aided inspection activities.

Visual inspection is a task regularly seen in manufacturing applications and is still primarily carried out by human operators. This study explored the use of job aids (anything used to assist the operator with the task, such as lists, check sheets or pictures) to assist with visual inspection within a manufacturing facility that inspects used parts. Job aids in the form of inspection manuals were used regularly during the inspection process, and how accurately they were followed was dependent on a number of factors such as size of part, experience of the operator, and accuracy of the inspection manuals. If the job aids were well structured, well written and accessible, then the inspectors were seen to follow them, however for certain jobs inspectors were seen to change the inspection order making inspection more efficient. The findings of the study suggest that prior experience can help in designing efficient, easy to use job aids and that a collaborative approach to design as well as using pictorial examples for comparison purposes would improve the inspection process.

Software diversity is known to improve fault tolerance in N-version software systems by independent development. As the leading cause of software faults, human error is considered an important factor in diversity seeking. However, there is little scientific research focusing on how to seek software fault diversity based on human error mechanisms. A literature review was conducted to extract factors that may differentiate people with respect to human error-proneness. In addition, we constructed a conceptual model of the links between human error diversity and software diversity. An experiment was designed to validate the hypotheses, in the form of a programming contest, accompanied by a survey of cognitive styles and personality traits. One hundred ninety-two programs were submitted for the identical problem, and 70 surveys were collected. Code inspection revealed 23 faults, of which 10 were coincident faults. The results show that personality traits seems not effective predictors for fault diversity as a whole model, whereas cognitive styles and program measurements moderately account for the variation of fault density. The results also show causal relations between performance levels and coincident faults: coincident faults are unlikely to occur at skill-based performance level; the coincident faults introduced in rule-based performances show a high probability of occurrence, and the coincident faults introduced in knowledge-based performances are shaped by the content and formats of the task itself. Based on these results, we have proposed a model to seek software diversity and prevent coincident faults.

Machine vision technologies have been widely used for automating the product quality control, but the defect inspection for codes on complex backgrounds is still a challenging task in the plastic container industry. In this work, an efficient and accurate inspection solution based on deep learning was proposed aiming at the detection of codes on complex backgrounds for the plastic container such as beverage packages. Firstly, image processing algorithms such as the region translation method, morphological processing, and image matching technology based on SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) features were implemented to generate synthetic defective samples, which moderated the class-imbalance problem. Data augmentation strategies were used to increase the amount of training data. Secondly, the ShuffleNet V2 framework was adapted to inspect inkjet codes on complex backgrounds. Additionally, the transfer learning was used to transfer the trained model to other inspection tasks for different kinds of packages. Finally, the proposed approach was built onto an in-line code inspection apparatus for the plastic container industry, and an accuracy of 0.9988 was achieved. The in-line testing results of false detection and omission detection rates demonstrated that the proposed solution can fully meet the production requirements. To the best of our knowledge, this report describes the first time that deep learning has been applied to the industrial defect inspection for the plastic container industry.

In software product lines (SPL), scoping is a phase responsible for capturing, specifying and modeling features, and also their constraints, interactions and variations. The feature specification task, performed in this phase, is usually based on natural language, which may lead to lack of clarity, non-conformities and defects. Consequently, scoping analysts may introduce ambiguity, inconsistency, omissions and non-conformities. In this sense, this paper aims at gathering evidence about the effects of applying an inspection approach to feature specification for SPL. Data from a SPL reengineering project were analyzed in this work and the analysis indicated that the correction activity demanded more effort. Also, Pareto's principle showed that incompleteness and ambiguity reported higher non-conformity occurrences. Finally, the Poisson regression analysis showed that sub-domain risk information can be a good indicator for prioritization of sub-domains in the inspection activity.

Training has been identified as a principal intervention strategy to improve the quality and reliability of aircraft inspection and reducing errors. This paper explores the use of advanced technology for inspection training and reducing inspector errors within the general aviation industry. The research extended earlier work on computer-based inspection training, for the commercial aviation system into an inspection training system for the general aviation (GA) industry. In this article we describe the results of the research pursued over three years with the following specific objectives: (1) conduct task analyses of existing inspection operations at geographically dispersed GA locations, (2) develop and organize content to support inspection training, (3) deliver a prototype training system and (4) disseminate the findings of the research to the GA community and aviation research community. Relevance to industry Specifically designed for training aircraft maintenance technicians in inspection skills, the computer-based inspection training tool entitled GAITS – General Aviation Inspection Training System uses a multi-media presentational approach with interaction opportunities between the user and the computer. It is anticipated that the use of this tool will systematize and standardize the inspection training process in the general aviation industry.

A significant amount of software is developed all over the world by small and medium size software organizations. These organizations do not have enough infrastructures and resources to implement an austere quality plan. Software inspection is a fundamental component of the software quality assurance process. Formal review methods are rigorous and their implementation is cumbersome for small and medium enterprises. In this paper, we have presented a new simplified inspection process which is easy to implement, requires fewer resource and almost no documentation. Also, people who are conducting this inspection need not be present at the same place during most stages of the inspection process. We have also compared this process with IEEE and NASA standards for software inspection and found that it meets almost 99% of both standards. While there has been much research on inspection, little attention is paid towards compliance with international standards. These results could be used as a basis for further research in software inspection and process towards aligning with international standards. This process has been successfully implemented in a CMM level 3 software development organization which is striving to accomplish higher maturity levels to establish at the international level.

Construction inspectors need inspection planning assistance to specify goals for inspection and to develop and search among feasible inspection plans that inspectors can implement to address these inspection goals on construction sites. This paper presents the details of an automated planning approach to support on-site construction inspections and thereby permit inspectors to both generate complete, detailed inspection plans and to consider numerous possible alternatives in detail. The approach consists of representations and reasoning mechanisms to develop inspection goals and plans, and to support consideration of multiple possible inspection plans. In particular, the approach consists of a series of matching processes, facilitated by faceted classification reasoning, and a generative method-based approach to inspection planning that features a measurement distribution concept to permit various approaches for distributing measurements throughout components. The authors present an object-oriented prototype to illustrate and demonstrate this approach, together with detailed validation discussions that utilize inspection scenarios documented in construction inspection literature to demonstrate the generality and applicability of the developed approach.

In this paper we offer a report on a university-level programming laboratory course that has been designed on top of a programming library. The course enforces soft skills, such as code inspection and team working, sharpens implementation skills and creates a bridge between introductory, language-specific instruction and senior-year full-blown programming projects that are usually large but not attending to soft skills. Quite as importantly, it has also delivered a working research tool.

Software architecture evaluation is an effective means of addressing quality related issues early in the software development lifecycle. Scenario-based approaches to evaluate architecture usually involve a large number of stakeholders, who need to be collocated for face-to-face evaluation meetings. Collocating a large number of stakeholders is an expensive and time-consuming exercise, which may prove to be a hurdle in the wide-spread adoption of disciplined architectural evaluation practices. Drawing upon the successful introduction of groupware applications to support geographically distributed teams in software inspection, and requirements engineering disciplines, we propose the concept of distributed architectural evaluation using Internet-based collaborative technologies. This paper presents a pilot study used to assess the viability of a larger experiment intended to investigate the feasibility of groupware support for distributed software architecture evaluation. In addition, the results of the pilot study provide some preliminary findings on the viability of groupware-supported software architectural evaluation process.

The article starts out from the observation that software engineering splits in two large activity areas: Software specification with its verification and software implementation with its verification. To find answers to the question in the title the article studies a practical systems software engineering area where theory is better developed than compared to other areas: Compiler construction. Our answer is a conclusion from work in the DFG-project Verifix, U.Karlsruhe, U.Kiel, U.Ulm, 1995-2003. One very complex cooperational task has been construction of a so called initial correct compiler for a realistic high level programming (and compiler writing) language correctly implemented and executed on a real life host processor. The interface between compiling specification and compiler implementation is given by algebraic-style, conditional formula transformation or program term rewriting rules which the specifier figures out and must prove correct w. r. t. source program and target processor semantics and data and states representations. Intensive cooperation of compiling specifiers and compiler implementers has revealed that the implementer's mathematical reasoning is algebraic reasoning of moderate depth. The specifier overtakes semantical issues and does induction proofs, a field of much more intricate mathematical reasoning.

Software reliability is an important feature of a good software implementation. However some faults which cause software unreliability are not detected during the development stages, and these faults create unexpected problems for users whenever they arise. At present most of the current techniques detect faults while a software is running. These techniques interrupt the software process when a fault occurs, and require some forms of restart. In this paper Precompiled Fault Detection (PFD) technique is proposed to detect and correct faults before a source code is compiled. The objective of the PFD technique is to increase software reliability without increasing the programmers' responsibilities. The concepts of ''pre-compilation'' and ''pattern matching'' are applied to PFD in order to reduce the risk of significant damage during execution period. This technique can completely eliminate the significant faults in a software and thus, improves software reliability.

A thorough requirements analysis is indispensable for developing and implementing safety-critical software systems such as nuclear power plant (NPP) software systems because a single error in the requirements can generate serious software faults. However, it is very difficult to completely analyze system requirements. In this paper, an effective technique for the software requirements analysis is suggested. For requirements verification and validation (V&V) tasks, our technique uses software inspection, requirement traceability, and formal specification with structural decomposition. Software inspection and requirements traceability analysis are widely considered the most effective software V&V methods. Although formal methods are also considered an effective V&V activity, they are difficult to use properly in the nuclear fields as well as in other fields because of their mathematical nature. In this work, we propose an integrated environment (IE) approach for requirements, which is an integrated approach that enables easy inspection by combining requirement traceability and effective use of a formal method. The paper also introduces computer-aided tools for supporting IE approach for requirements. Called the nuclear software inspection support and requirements traceability (NuSISRT), the tool incorporates software inspection, requirement traceability, and formal specification capabilities. We designed the NuSISRT to partially automate software inspection and analysis of requirement traceability. In addition, for the formal specification and analysis, we used the formal requirements specification and analysis tool for nuclear engineering (NuSRS).

In safety critical components, the capability of an inspection may need to be demonstrated by an independent process of inspection qualification (IQ). Due to the skill level of the manpower involved, IQ is both costly and time consuming. Therefore, an approach that can aid the production of the required documentation would be beneficial. This paper presents a practical example in the form of a case study, which demonstrates how an intelligent approach to IQ, utilising smart software operating within the context of a non-destructive testing Workbench, can be used to evaluate the capability of an ultrasonic inspection. This is accomplished using four interactive software tools which include: a beam-coverage analyser, a worst-case defect search engine, a flaw modelling expert system and a case-based reasoning system to retrieve previously measured data. This paper discusses the motivation for such an approach and the benefits it provides.

The main objective of software inspections is to find faults in software documents. The benefits of inspections are reported from researchers as well as software organizations. However, inspections are time consuming and the resources may not be sufficient to inspect all documents. Sampling of documents in inspections provides a systematic solution to select what to be inspected in the case resources are not sufficient to inspect everything. The method presented in this paper uses sampling, inspection and resource scheduling to increase the efficiency of an inspection session. A pre-inspection phase is used in order to determine which documents need most inspection time, i.e. which documents contain most faults. Then, the main inspection is focused on these documents. We describe the sampling method and provide empirical evidence, which indicates that the method is appropriate to use. A Monte Carlo simulation is used to evaluate the proposed method and a case study using industrial data is used to validate the simulation model. Furthermore, we discuss the results and important future research in the area of sampling of software inspections.

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.

Software inspection is recognized as an effective verification technique. Despite this fact, the use of inspection is surprisingly low. This paper describes a new inspection technique, called task-directed inspection (TDI), and a light-weight process, that were used to introduce inspection in a particular industrial environment. This environment had no history of inspections, was resistant to the idea of inspection, but had a situation where confidence in a safety-related legacy suite of software had to be increased. The characteristics of TDI are explored. They give rise to a variety of approaches that may encourage more widespread use of inspections. This paper examines the industrial exercise as a case study, with the intent that it be useful in other situations that share characteristics with the situation described.

Software inspection is a method to detect faults in the early phases of the software life cycle. In order to estimate the number of faults not found, capture-recapture was introduced for software inspections in 1992 to estimate remaining faults after an inspection. Since then, several papers have been written in the area, concerning the basic theory, evaluation of models and application of the method. This paper summarizes the work made in capture-recapture for software inspections during these years. Furthermore, and more importantly, the contribution of the papers are classified as theory, evaluation or application, in order to analyse the performed research as well as to highlight the areas of research that need further work. It is concluded that (1) most of the basic theory is investigated within biostatistics, (2) most software engineering research is performed on evaluation, a majority ending up in recommendation of the Mh-JK model, and (3) there is a need for application experiences. In order to support the application, ail inspection process is presented with decision points based on capture-recapture estimates.

Automatic inspection of welded gas pipelines is desirable because human inspectors are not always consistent evaluators. In addition, automatic inspection decreases the cost of inspection process and improves the inspection quality. In this paper, an expert vision system for automatic inspection of gas pipeline welding defects from radiographic films is presented. The proposed system has been established in the Metrology lab, Mansoura University, Faculty of Engineering. The software, named AutoWDI, is fully written in lab using Microsoft Visual C++ and is ready to run on any Windows environment. The proposed vision system is used to capture images for the radiographic films then applies various image processing and computer vision algorithms to recognize the defects and to make acceptance decisions according to international standards. The expert system is based on a knowledge base, which was gathered from specialists, textbooks and international standards. The proposed system is capable of identifying and testing the main types of welding defects (11 defects) in gas pipelines welded by shielded metal arc welding.

Software inspection is accepted as an effective technique in the battle against defects. However, many organizations fail to maximize these benefits because, for example, the inspection team has difficulty setting exit or re-inspection criteria. This should ideally be based upon an estimate of the number of remaining defects in the source document. It is proposed that a subjective estimate of these remaining defects from individual inspectors can be an effective method for estimating the number of remaining defects, and hence it can be utilized as a mechanism to implement the exit or re-inspection decision.

Based on defect data from an inspection the number of defects present in a software product can be estimated to decide on further development or quality assurance activities. Project managers are primarily interested to determine the number of major defects in the product, which may have a strong impact on product quality as well as on project schedule and cost, if they go undetected.In this work we focus on the estimation of major defects in a software requirements document. We compare the performance of objective and subjective defect content estimation techniques. For validation of the techniques we conducted a controlled experiment with 31 inspection teams which consisted of 4-6 persons.Main findings of the experiment are: (a) Objective estimation models estimated major and all defects with similar accuracy. (b) The best subjective estimations models performed for major defects comparable to the best objective estimation models. (c) The defect detection technique used influenced the set of defects found in the team, but did not make a significant difference for the accuracy of defect estimation. (d) The second inspection cycle significantly improved the estimation accuracy for all but one estimation models.

Software inspections are an efficient method to detect faults in software artefacts. In order to estimate the fault content remaining after inspections, a method called capture-recapture has been introduced. Most research published in fault content estimations for software inspections has focused upon point estimations. However, confidence intervals provide more information of the estimation results and are thus preferable. This paper replicates a capture -recapture study and investigates confidence intervals for capture -recapture estimators using data sets from two recently conducted software inspection experiments. Furthermore, a discussion of practical application of capture-recapture with confidence intervals is provided. In capture-recapture, used for software inspection, most research papers have reported Mh-JK to be the best estimator, but only one study has investigated its subestimators. In addition, confidence intervals based on the log-normal distribution have not been evaluated before with software inspection data. These two investigations together with a discussion provide the main contribution of this paper. The result confirms the conclusions of the replicated study and shows when confidence intervals for capture-recapture estimators can be trusted. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Software inspection, due to its repeated success on industrial applications, has now become an industry standard practice. Recently, researchers began analyzing inspection data to obtain insights on how software processes can be improved. For example, project managers need to identify potentially error-prone software components so that limited project resource may be optimally allocated. This paper proposes an automated and fuzzy logic-based approach to satisfy such a need. Fuzzy logic offers significant advantages over other approaches due to its ability to naturally represent qualitative aspect of inspection data and apply flexible inference rules. In order to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we have analyzed published inspection data and the ones collected from two separate inspection experiments which we had conducted. χ2 analysis is applied to statistically demonstrate validity of the proposed quality prediction model.

This paper investigates the proposition: are the results (defects found) of individual software inspectors during a software inspection process (preparation phase) statistically independent or dependent? The rationale for exploring this proposition is that many capture-recapture models assume statistical independence in their formulations. Recently these models have been applied to estimating the number of undiscovered defects undetected by an inspection process. Using large amounts of inspection data from a previous experiment, and subsequently simulating a capture-recapture time-series from this data, the paper explores this proposition. The correlation within the time-series is then estimated using non-parametric techniques. The paper concludes that, for the data used, no evidence exists to support the statement that the results from individual inspectors are dependent.

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.

Software inspection is well-known as an effective defect finding process. One avenue of inspection research concerns tool support, with the aim of further increasing its efficiency and effectiveness. This has resulted in the production of a number of prototype tools. In general, however, these tools are poorly evaluated and the performance gain which these tools may provide has not been quantified. This paper describes an incremental, cyclic approach to the development and evaluation of a tool to support software inspection. A version of the tool was developed then evaluated against traditional, paper-based inspection. The results were then used to guide development of the next version. This paper describes two of these cycles and the results of the corresponding evaluations. The approach was found to be a useful one, and is applicable to the development of many other tools, processes or procedures.

This paper contributes an integrated survey of the work in the area of software inspection. It consists of two main sections. The first one introduces a detailed description of the core concepts and relationships that together define the field of software inspection. The second one elaborates a taxonomy that uses a generic development life-cycle to contextualize software inspection in detail. After Fagan's seminal work presented in 1976, the body of work in software inspection has greatly increased and reached measured maturity. Yet, there is still no encompassing and systematic view of this research body driven from a life-cycle perspective. This perspective is important since inspection methods and refinements are most often aligned to particular life-cycle artifacts. It also provides practitioners with a roadmap available in their terms. To provide a systematic and encompassing view of the research and practice body in software inspection, the contribution of this survey is, in a first step, to introduce in detail the core concepts and relationships that together embody the field of software inspection. This lays out the field key ideas and benefits and elicits a common vocabulary. There, we make a strong effort to unify the relevant vocabulary used in available literature sources. In a second step, we use this vocabulary to build a contextual map of the field in the form of a taxonomy indexed by the different development stages of a generic process. This contextual map can guide practitioners and focus their attention on the inspection work most relevant to the introduction or development of inspections at the level of their particular development stage; or to help motivate the use of software inspection earlier in their development cycle. Our work provides three distinct, practical benefits: First, the index taxonomy can help practitioners identify inspection experience directly related to a particular life-cycle stage. Second, our work allows structuring of the large amount of published inspection work. Third, such taxonomy can help researchers compare and assess existing inspection methods and refinements to identify fruitful areas of future work.

Software inspection is a valuable technique for defect detection. Recent research has considered the development of computer support, with the aim of providing even greater benefits when applying inspection. This has resulted in the development of a number of prototype support systems. These suffer from some fundamental limitations, however. Asynchronous/Synchronous Software Inspection Support Tool (ASSIST) is designed to tackle these limitations and to provide a platform for rigorous investigation of the inspection process. It uses a custom-designed language known as Inspection Process Definition Language to allow support of any inspection process, and provides an open, expandable system allowing multiple document types to be catered for easily. A number of facilities designed to enhance the inspection process are also present.

IEC 61131-3, the world-wide standard for industrial control programming, is increasingly being used in safety-related control applications. Control loops are built from components taken from domain-specific function block libraries. Code inspection and testing are the two predominant quality assurance techniques. For highly dependable control applications, however, these techniques are not sufficient, in general. This paper suggests to augment testing with compositional, theorem-prover supported verification. The approach is based on a representation of IEC 61131-3 function blocks in higher-order logic. The verification task is separated into the a priori verification of library components and a separate proof of individual application programs.

As the result of keen producer competition in an increasingly international market, product quality has become the quintessential selling point. Early identification of deviations occurring during the production process is also an issue to be tackled by companies. In order to produce a product which lives up to its optimal quality standard, an effective and efficient series of testing methods has been developed, whereby employees utilize specially evolved inspection instructions to carry out the so-called self-inspection. Containing pictorial representations of the products to be checked, these inspection instructions were introduced in work settings. To obtain a point of reference, as to exactly which criteria is to be examined during the inspection, a drawing containing technical inspection instructions was compared with two variants. Of the two variants, the first was a simplified drawing reduced only to the specific details necessary for inspection, and the second was a photograph of the object to be inspected. The ensuing experiment was carried out with the participation of 78 female students at the University of Dortmund who assessed the quality of the inspection by means of a self-administered questionnaire. The verdict reached based upon the subjective evaluation of the three varied depictions verified that comprehension and subsequent transfer of information to the inspection process is dependent upon unambiguous markings of each particular control characteristic, as well as the clarity of the illustration. The photograph included also provided no additional benefit. Relevance to industry The result of the implemented experiment show that institution of inspection instructions from detailed technical drawings to simple line drawings should waived.

IEC 61131-3, the world-wide standard for industrial control programming, is increasingly being used in embadded control applications. The standard supports the concept of reusable “software ICs” through the concept of function blocks. can be hierarchically grouped and horizontally “wired” to Complex control loops are typically built from elementary components taken from domain-specific libraries. Code inspection and testing are the two predominant quality assurance techniques in practice, today. For highly dependable control applications, however, these techniques are not sufficient, in general. This paper suggests to augment testing with compositional, theorem-prover supported verification. The approach is based on a representation of IEC 61131-3 function blocks in higher-order logic. The verification task is separated into the a priori verification of library components and a separate proof of individual application programs. The latter relies on proven properties of the library components used. We sketch the semantic embedding of three most used languages of the IEC standard and illustrate our verification approach with a simple example. We conclude with a wish list for a verification tool that is usable by application and licensing engineers.

Group support systems (GSS) represent one of the real success stories of research by the MIS academic community. There is no doubt that GSS academic research has had an impact on practice in the MIS field. This paper discusses the future of GSS research in terms of what is needed, some important research questions, and offers some possible directions. Section 1 describes what a GSS is and explains the underlying fundamental background. Section 2 explains why GSS research is needed. Section 3 describes the multimethodological approach that is needed for well-grounded GSS research programs. Section 4 discusses some of the major issues in applying GSS in organizational settings. Section 5 explores the scope of GSS research and the questions that need to be answered. Section 6 provides keys to successful distributed collaboration from our experience. Section 7 starts to answer the difficult question “what is needed for a distributed workspace?” Section 8 begins to clarify just what virtual reality can offer for distributed collaboration. Section 9 explains the justification for a virtual reality representation of the distributed office. Section 10 explores what we need to get real work done in a virtual workspace including: support for sense making during the process, automating bottlenecks in the process, modeling through simulation and animation, multiple languages, education, crisis response and software inspection. Research in GSS is just beginning and thousands of questions must be answered before we can have an understanding of the field.

Despite dramatic changes in software development in the two decades since the term software engineering was coined, software quality deficiencies and cost overruns continue to afflict the software industry. Inspections, developed at IBM by Fagan in the early 1970s 1], can be used to improve upon these problems because they allow the detection and removal of defects after each phase of the software development process. But, in most published inspection processes, individuals performing defect detection are not systematically supported. There, defect detection depends heavily upon factors like chance or experience. Further, there is an ongoing debate in the literature whether or not defect detection is more effective when performed as a group activity and hence should be conducted in meetings 5,11,13,14]. In this article we introduce Perspective-based Reading (PBR) for code documents, a systematic technique to support individual defect detection. PBR offers guidance to individual inspectors for defect detection. This guidance is embodied within perspective-based algorithmic scenarios which makes individual defect detection independent of experience. To test this assumption, we tailored and introduced PBR in the inspection process at Robert Bosch GmbH. We conducted two training sessions in the form of a 2 × 3 fractional-factorial experiment in which 11 professional software developers reviewed code documents from three different perspectives. The experimental results are: (1) Perspectivebased Reading and the type of document have an influence on individual defect detection, (2) multi-individual inspection meetings were not very useful to detect defects, (3) the overlap of detected defects among inspectors using different perspectives is low, and (4) there are no significant differences with respect to defect detection between inspectors having experiences in the programming language and/or the application domain and those that do not.

This paper first briefly introduces the fundamentals of automated inspection techniques, followed by a categorization of typical applications. At its focus the paper elaborates on issues relating to the need for, the approach to and the benefits of integrating automatic inspection systems within the context of computer integrated PCB manufacturing. It argues that automatic inspection systems should assume the role of not only quality inspection systems but also important quality information generators on the shop floor. In particular, integrated quality control will be realized through an integration of inspection systems with process/quality control systems such as statistical process control (SPC).

The software inspection process was created for the dual purpose of improving software quality and increasing programmers productivity. This paper puts forward formal inspections as an alternative to and a better method than technical walkthroughs in the software life cycle reviewing process. Examples of benefits gained in the development of defect-free software by utilizing formal inspections are cited.

Software inspection is a technical evaluation process for finding and removing defects in requirements, design, code, and tests. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, tailored Fagan's original process of software inspections to conform to its software development environment in 1987. Detailed data collected from 203 inspections during the first three years of experience at JPL included averages of staff time expended, pages covered, major and minor defects found, and inspection team size. The data were tested for homogeneity. Randomized samples belonging to the various phases or treatments were analyzed using the completely randomized block design analysis of variance (α = 0.05). The results showed a significantly higher density of defects during requirements inspections. The number of defect densities decreased exponentially as the work products approached the coding phase because defects were fixed when detected and did not migrate to subsequent phases. This resulted in a relatively flat profile for cost to fix. Increasing the pace of the inspection meeting decreased the density of defects found. This relationship held for major and minor defect densities, although it was more pronounced for minor defects.

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.

This bibliography lists publications, reports and articles dealing with automated visual inspection for industry, arranged in categories by subject matter. Publications as overviews and general discussions are listed first. Topics on rationales for automating the inspection process, visual inspection system components and design considerations follow. Commercially available visual inspection equipment are presented as a list of selectively annotated references. Publications on various inspection applications and their inspection methodologies are organized into 9 groups. They include the visual inspection of printed circuit boards, IC chips, semiconduction photomasks, automobile parts, fabric and other electrical assemblies, and inspection in the metal processing industry, lumber industry and food processing industry. A set of key words is also provided at the beginning of each category.

A major difficulty in developing the link from computer aided design (CAD) to automatic part inspection involves extracting the dimensioning and tolerancing information from a part drawing. This design information must be associated with the corresponding geometric features when controlling an inspection machine. In this paper, a methodology is developed for extracting the necessary design information from a CAD system to control a two-dimensional video inspection system. Information regarding part geometry, datums, and geometric tolerances and dimensions is generated during the design process and written to machine-independent data files. This information is then post-processed to automatically generate inspection programs for a specific inspection machine. This computer aided inspection system provides a foundation for research in the area of CAD-directed inspection. Because the system is modular, additional capabilities may be added to increase the efficiency of the process or to support other inspection devices. The computer aided inspection system demonstrates the concept of automatically controlling a measurement machine using CAD design data.

Software quality and reliability detection are essential in the software development cycle. Also important is the increasing ratio of software to hardware costs. More important is the increasing reliance upon larger and more complex computer programs which are used to control and make decisions on the status of safety-critical systems, such as nuclear reactors, transportation systems, medical life support equipment, and military weapon systems. There exist major differences between software reliability and hardware reliability, since software can have faults and still function acceptably nearly all the time. This performance might be adequate if the user is willing to tolerate the absence of some function for the interval of time between the first appearance of the problem and its eventual correction. On the other hand, there exist many applications, such as real-time processing of medical data for a patient under intensive care, or assessment of safety-critical parameters for a nuclear reactor, where the loss of some function would be intolerable for the time it takes to correct the software error which caused the problem.