The Impact of Time Controlled Reading on Software Inspection Effectiveness and Efficiency A Controlled Experiment

Reading techniques help to guide reviewers during individ-ual software inspections. In this experiment, we completely transfer the principle of statistical usage testing to inspec-tion reading techniques for the first time. Statistical usage testing relies on a usage profile to determine how intensively certain parts of the system shall be tested from the users’ perspective. Usage-based reading applies statistical usage testing principles by utilizing prioritized use cases as a driver for inspecting software artifacts (e.g., design). In order to reflect how intensively certain use cases should be inspected, time budgets are introduced to usage-based reading where a maximum inspection time is assigned to each use case. High priority use cases receive more time than low prior-ity use cases. A controlled experiment is conducted with 23 Software Engineering M.Sc. students inspecting a design document. In this experiment, usage-based reading without time budgets is compared with time controlled usage-based reading. The result of the experiment is that time bud-gets do not significantly improve inspection performance. In conclusion, it is sufficient to only use prioritized use cases to successfully transfer statistical usage testing to inspections