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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).

There is a great need to assure and improve the reliability and quality of software. Software inspections were introduced over 30 years ago as an answer for this need and they have inspired a lot of research covering many different kinds of aspects. There is a need for an up-to-date survey revealing the current state and the overall evolution of the most prominent research on the area. This paper presents a comprehensive survey focusing on the most relevant 16 interna- tional high-impact scientific publication series. There are 153 articles included in the survey covering both technical and management aspects. The main results include a description of the research trends during 1980-2008 and a description of the main results of the included studies. The description is organized based on a taxonomy of the inspection research as having emerged based on the survey. At general level the surveyed research provides clear evidence that inspections gen- erally benefit software development and quality assurance. There are several proposed theoretical variations for the in- spection process but also many empirical studies. Although the conducted research is relatively scattered, proper science- based understanding about some of the most studied issues has been achieved. Our main conclusion is that conducting empirical research needs to be continued in order to validate the effects of the different kinds of proposed theoretical con- structs in practice. Empirical studies are needed especially in order to better understand the proper implementation and the actual impacts of applying inspections in different kinds of industrial and organizational settings.

It is widely accepted that the inspection of software artifacts can find defects early in the development process and gather information on the quality of the evolving product. However, the inspection process is resource-intensive and involves tedious tasks, such as searching, sorting, and checking. Tool support for inspections can help accelerating these tasks and allows inspectors to concentrate on tasks particularly needing human attention. Only few tools are available for inspections. We have thus developed a set of groupware tools for both individual defect detection and inspection meetings to lower the effort of inspections and to increase their efficiency. This paper presents the Groupware-supported Inspection Process (GrIP) and describes tools for inspecting software requirements. As only little empirical work exists that directly compares paper-based and tool-based software inspection, we conducted a family of experiments in an academic environment to empirically investigate the effect of tool support regarding defect detection and inspection meetings. The main results of our family of experiments regarding individual defect detection are promising: The effectiveness of inspectors and teams is comparable to paper-based inspection without tool support; the inspection effort and defect overlap decreases significantly with tool support, while the efficiency of inspection teams increases considerably. Regarding tool support for inspection meetings the main findings of the experiments are that tool support considerably lowers the meeting effort, supports inspectors in identifying false positives, and reduces the number of true defects lost during a meeting. The number of unidentified false positives is still quite high.

Although software inspection has led to improvements in software quality, many software systems continue to be deployed with unacceptable numbers of errors, even when software inspection is part of the development process. The difficulty of manually verifying that the software under inspection conforms to the rules is partly to blame. We describe the design and implementation of a tool designed to help alleviate this problem. The tool provides mechanisms for fine-grained inspection of software by exposing the results of sophisticated whole-program static analysis to the inspector. The tool computes many static-semantic representations of the program, including an accurate call graph and dependence graph. A whole-program pointer analysis is used to make sure that the representation is precise with respect to aliases induced by pointer usage. Views on the dependence graph and related representations are supported. Queries on the dependence graph allow an inspector to answer detailed questions about the semantics of the program. Facilities for openness and extensibility permit the tool to be integrated with many software development processes. The main challenge of the approach is to provide facilities to navigate and manage the enormous complexity of the dependence graph.

Software inspection is well-known as an effective means of defect detection. Nevertheless, recent research has suggested that the technique requires further development to optimize the inspection process. As the process is inherently group-based, one approach to improving performance is to attempt to minimize the commonality within the process and the group. This work proposes an approach to add diversity into the process by using a cognitively-based team selection mechanism. The paper argues that a team with diverse information processing strategies, as defined by the selection mechanism, maximize the number of different defects discovered.

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 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.

When learning a new software engineering technique, there is a learning curve that must be overcome. In particular, when studies are conducted in a classroom setting, researchers need a method for quickly accelerating the experience of novice subjects to allow the results to be more applicable in industrial settings. In this paper, we propose and test a method to enable novices to gain process experience to allow them to more quickly overcome the learning curve. The method we evaluate allows an inspector to gain experience with the inspection process by observing an inspection performed by someone else. The results of the study show that the proposed method for gaining experience appears to be useful in some limited cases, that is, for low experienced subjects who were inspecting a requirements document from a domain in which they had low knowledge. Based on the results of this study, we are able to propose some new related hypotheses to be tested in future studies.

Software inspection is a proven technique to improve quality and reduce costs. Detailed source code inspections are an important part of the formal inspection process, but they require a significant time investment. Research advances in static program analysis can reduce the inspection time required. By calculating answers to standard inspection questions, CodeSurfer frees experts to focus their efforts on more challenging inspection issues. CodeSurfer provides access to and answers queries about the system-dependence graph representation of programs, and can be integrated with other tools.

Використання програмних засобів з виявлення текстових збігів забезпечує аналіз наукових та академічних робіт на наявність ознак плагіату. Вичерпний перелік текстових запозичень, який отримується в результаті, є основою для прийняття рішення експертами-оцінювачами щодо наявності плагіату. В роботі описано роль спеціалізованого програмного забезпечення у системній боротьбі з плагіатом.

The use of software identifying text coincidences instruments provides an analysis of scientific and academic works for the evidence of plagiarism. Besides, the anti-plagiarism is not just a fight against illegal text borrowings as consequences of this phenomenon. It should be a comprehensive mechanism for dealing with both the consequences and the causes of the appearance of such a phenomenon. Such mechanism should include the implementation of the system of values that correspond to the principles of academic integrity, along with making total enquiries of all works on plagiarism. The exhaustive list of text borrowings, which is resultant, is the basis for expertsassessors decision-making in point of plagiarism presence. What is more, there should be no permissible standards of the plagiarism. All borrowings must being drawn up in accordance with the requirements. Therefore, the best result in the fight against plagiarism will achieved only by comprehensive approach – when the academic culture and the principles of academic integrity will be instilled ever since school, along with the check of all works for plagiarism.

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.

Software inspection process is an effective activity to find defects on software artifacts as soon as they are introduced. The development of experimental knowledge on this area is useful to everyone who needs to make decisions about inspection activity. This paper aims to map the empirical studies conducted in the software inspection process area. The steps of the Systematic Mapping (SM) process was performed with the support of the StArt tool. Seventy nine papers were accepted in this SM and attributes related to inspection process, techniques, tools, inspected artifacts, research groups and universities were extracted. The results show different inspection processes, which have been experimentally investigated. Fagan’s process is the most investigated of them. In relation to inspected artifacts, requirements document and source code were the most used. Moreover, different tools and techniques have been used to support these processes.

Software inspections are recommended for improving the quality of software artifacts, but their effectiveness heavily depends on properly training inspectors and other stakeholders in the inspection process. We previously proposed InspectorX, a serious game for learning and training on software inspections, whose design accounts for an optimized cognitive load by offering different levels of difficulty. The game has already been evaluated regarding its learning potential in the detection of defects, revealing positive outcomes. Since then, InspectorX has extended its coverage to other stages of the inspection process, for a more realistic simulation. This paper presents the games novel features and a new experiment that evaluates them with a bigger sample. Results indicate that there was considerable knowledge retention with just 20 minutes of gameplay. Suggestions on its design made by the experiment volunteers are also discussed.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior Repairing a defect in late phases of software development can be a hundred times more expensive than finding and fixing it during the requirements and design phase. Software inspection is a technique that may be used to aid in the identification of defects during early stages of the process and avoid propagation of such defects to the next phases. The cost-benefit of inspections may be significant if they are efficiently performed. Since this process is affected by several quality factors, the analysis of the overall context of inspection may become complex. Project managers are reluctant in introducing inspection due to uncertainty regarding its real benefits. This paper presents a system dynamics model, which is a descriptive technique for systems modeling and simulation and involves several variables that strongly influence inspection efficiency. The influence levels of model variables are quantified with basis on real or empirical experiments reported in literature, in order to approximate model results to values that would be obtained in the real world. The model allows the reproduction of scenarios without having the costs and facing the risk of a real project implementation. Therefore, it enables the analysis of the impacts of inspections on the software development process. Reparar um defeito de software pode custar até 100 vezes mais caro, caso ele não seja encontrado o mais próximo possível de onde foi cometido. A inspeção de software é uma técnica que pode ser usada para ajudar a detectar defeitos nas primeiras fases do processo, evitando que esses defeitos sejam propagados para as fases seguintes. O custo/benefício de inspeções pode se tornar bastante significativo, se as inspeções forem realizadas de forma eficiente. Por ser influenciada por muitos fatores de qualidade, a análise do contexto da inspeção como um todo pode se tornar complexa. Gerentes de projeto deixam de utilizar a inspeção com dúvida dos reais benefícios que ela pode gerar. O objetivo desse trabalho é criar um modelo de dinâmica de sistemas, que é uma técnica descritiva utilizada para modelagem e simulação de sistemas, envolvendo variáveis que influenciam fortemente na eficiência da inspeção. Os níveis de influência das variáveis que fazem parte do modelo são quantificados com base em experimentos reais ou empíricos disponibilizados na literatura, tornando os resultados do modelo próximos do que seria obtido no mundo real. O modelo permite reproduzir cenários nos quais seria caro ou perigoso experimentar na realidade, sendo possível analisar os impactos que a inspeção pode trazer no processo de desenvolvimento.

Independent researches of expert groups and scientific papers show that , although some testing models and automated and manual tools are mostly used, but still some software and software projects deal with important defects that may lead to project failure. Most of software inspection models are independent of software developing process and concentrating on inspection artifacts. In this article, the proposed model is based on software developing phases adapted predefined scenarios. This inspection approach removes some possible defects in each of software development phase and avoids amplifying these defects in each of the next phases. Defect learning is the interesting point of scenario-based proposed model. Learning is a basic factor for a model to be intelligent. In this model a learning plan is created and executed through which, according to founded results, inspection process is modified and updated. The efficiency of model is evaluated through a case study.

Globally distributed software development is an established trend towards delivering high-quality software to global users at lower costs. The main expected benefits from distributed software development are improvements in development time efficiency, being close to the customers and having flexible access to greater and less costly resources. Organizations require to use their existing resources as effectively as possible, and also need to employ resources on a global scale from different sites within the organization and from partner organization throughout the world. However, distributed software development particularly face communication and coordination problems due to spatial, temporal and cultural separation between team members. Ensuring quality issues in such projects is a significant issue. This paper presents global software inspection process in the distributed software development environment towards quality assurance and management.

Taxonomien und Wissensgraphen in Wissensmodellierung und Extended Entity Relationship (EER) Diagramme in der Software Entwicklung, sind Formen von Konzeptionellen Modellen und dienen als Basis zu Entwicklung von Informations-Systemen. Die Verizierung dieser Konzeptionellen Modelle gegen��ber ihrem Referenzsystem (Spezikation) ist wesentlich um zu verhindern, dass defekte Model Elemente in den Software Entwicklungszyklus gelangen, da diese Modelle oft direkt zur Ableitung und Generierung von Software Artefakten, zum Beispiel in der Model-getriebenen Software Entwicklung, herangezogen werden. Sabou, Winkler et. al, schlagen einen generischen Ansatz zur Verizierung von Konzeptionellen Modellen (VeriCoM) vor, bei dem die traditionellen Software Inspizierungen mit Hilfe von Human Computation und Crowdsourcing erweitert werden. Die Performance von VeriCoM wurde mit Crowdsourced Software Inspection (CSI) Experimenten an einem Software Entwicklungs-Anwendungsfall getestet, bei dem die Korrektheit eines EER Diagramms in Bezug auf seine textuelle Spezikation ��berpr��ft wurde. Diese Experimente folgten einem haupts��chlich manuell ausgef��hrten wissenschaftlichen Experiment Prozess, welcher sehr Zeit aufw��ndig, Fehler anf��llig, nicht skalierbar und insgesamt nicht f��r gr����ere Gruppen von Experiment-TeilnehmerInnen geeignet war. Daher entstand die Notwendigkeit f��r die Automation dieses Experiment Prozesses durch ein Software Programm. Der Kern dieser Arbeit liegt in der Analyse des CSI-Experiment Prozesses und der detaillierten formalen Denition der ben��tigten Daten Modelle und Algorithmen zur Automatisierung von VeriCoM. Diese Daten Modelle und Algorithmen werden zur Entwicklung eines Prototypen einer CSI-Plattform herangezogen. Diese CSI-Plattform unterst��tzt die CSI-Experimente zur Validierung von VeriCoM. W��hrend eines Tests des Prototypen unter Live-Bedingungen im Rahmen eines CSI-Experiments, wurde gezeigt, dass die entwickelte CSI-Plattform die Arbeitslast des Experiment Administrations-Teams stark reduzierte und die anschlie��ende Umfrage zeigte zufriedene Experimentbeteiligte. Daher kann die Formale Denition von VeriCoM und der entwickelte CSI-Plattform Prototyp als Startpunkt f��r ein ausgereiftes Softwaresystem zur Automatisierung von VeriCoM und andere Experimenten innerhalb der CSI-Dom��ne herangezogen werden., Taxonomies and knowledge graphs in Knowledge Engineering and Extended Entity Relationship (EER) diagrams in Software Engineering, are forms of conceptual models and the basis for the development of information systems. Verifying these conceptual models against their frame of reference is crucial to prevent defective model elements from entering the Software Development Life Cycle, as these models can be directly used to create software artefacts and source code, by means of Model-Driven Software Engineering techniques. Enhancing traditional Software Inspection practices with Human Computation and Crowdsourcing, Sabou, Winkler et. al proposed a generic approach to Verify Conceptual Models (VeriCoM). The performance of VeriCoM was tested with Crowdsourced Software Inspection (CSI) experiments on a Software Engineering use case, verifying the correctness of an EER model with respect to a textual system specication. These experiments followed a mostly manually performed scientic experiment-process, which was very time-consuming, error prone, not scalable and overall not applicable for a larger crowd of participants. Thus, the need for automation of this experiment-process through a software tool arose. The core work of this thesis consists of an analysis of the CSI-Experiment process and the detailed formal denition of the data model and algorithms needed to automate VeriCoM. These data models and algorithms are used to develop a CSI-Platform prototype which supports the experiments to validate VeriCoM. During a test under live conditions within a CSI-Experiment, the CSI-Platform greatly reduced the workload of the experiment administrations team and the subsequent evaluation questionnaire showed satised stakeholders. Therefore the formal denition of VeriCoM and the developed CSI-Platform can act as a starting point for the development of a full-edged software system to automate VeriCoM and other experiments within CSI.