An Empirical Study of Communication in Code Inspect ions

This paper describes an empirical st,udy which addresses the issue of communication among members of a soft-ware development organization. In particular, data was collected concerning code inspections in one soft-ware development project. The question of interest is whether or not organizational structure (the network of relationships between developers) has an effect on the amount of effort expended on communication between developers. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used, including participant observation, structured interviews, generation of hypotheses from field notes, some simple statistical tests of relationships, and in-terpretation of results with qualitative anecdotes. The study results show that past and present working re-lationships between inspection participants affect the amount of meeting time spent in different types of dis-cussion, thus affecting the overall meeting length. Re-porting relationships and physical proximity also have an effect, as well as the point in the project that an in-spection occurs. All but the last of these factors are or-ganizational structure relationships. The contribution of the study is a set of well-supported hypotheses for further investigation