1An Experimental Comparison of Usage-Based and Checklist-Based

Software quality can be defined as the customers ’ perception of how a system works. Inspection is a method to monitor and control the quality throughout the development cycle. Reading techniques applied to inspections help reviewers to stay focused on the important parts of an artefact when inspecting. However, many reading techniques focus on finding as many faults as possible, regardless of their importance. Usage-based reading helps reviewers to focus on the most important parts of a software artefact from a user’s point of view. This paper presents an experiment, which compares usage-based and checklist-based reading. The results show that reviewers applying usage-based reading are more efficient and effective in detecting the most critical faults from a user’s point of view than reviewers using checklist-based reading. Usage-based reading may be preferable for software organ-izations that utilize or will start utilizing use cases in their software development