The combination of inspection and testing technologies

Software inspections as well as testing have an established track record in research and practice for enhancing the quality of software products. While a lot of research papers, industry reports, and empirical studies describe, characterize, or evaluate each of these technologies or their refinements in isolation, there is very little published work on how to use them in combination for the cost-effective detection and removal of defects. Considering the fact that quality becomes increasingly important for the software industry and already is considered a major cost driver in many software development projects, the combination of both technologies could result in a synergy effect with many benefits for practitioners. Based on a presentation of the essential elements of both technologies, this paper discusses two different combination strategies on an abstract level. The first one is empirical in nature. It allows project managers to monitor and control software inspection and testing technologies based on the collected information without significant changes to the underlying inspection and testing processes. The second one is methodological in nature. This requires changes to the existing inspection and testing implementation and a reorganization of the respective sequence of activities. The discussion in this paper is mainly driven by industrial needs and objectives rather than scholar considerations