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R. Meersman et al. (Eds.): OTM 2010 Workshops, LNCS 6428, pp. 289–296, 2010.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010
A Software Inspection Process for Globally
Distributed Teams
Deepti Mishra and Alok Mishra
Department of Computer Engineering, Atilim University,
Incek, 06836, Ankara, Turkey
deepti@atilim.edu.tr, alok@atilim.edu.tr
Abstract. Globally distributed software development is an accepted trend
towards delivering high-quality software to global users at lower costs. Globally
distributed software development teams particularly face communication and
coordination problems due to spatial, temporal and cultural separation between
team members. Ensuring quality issues in such projects is an important issue.
This paper presents a software inspection process in the distributed software
development towards quality assurance and management.
Keywords: Global Software Development, Distributed Software Development,
Software Inspection, Tool.
1 Introduction
Software inspection is structured, collaborative and established method of ensuring
quality in software engineering. Traditional inspection processes cannot be simply
adapted for being included into offshore or distributed software development where,
large permanent companies are replaced by temporary group of developers
collaborating on projects over the internet and in this context the inspection process
must be supported by web based environment [2]. The web based system facilitates
support for distributed inspection in virtual environment among global software
development teams. Distributed software development is a complex venture and
distributed tasks have been proven to take up to 2.5 times more effort to complete
than if the tasks were to have been done by co-located personnel [8].
According to Porter and Johnson [15], face-to-face meetings do not make the
defect detection process significantly less effective and also supported by [9, 10] that
there should be no substantial differences in efficiency between traditional and
computer-supported inspections. Virtual software inspection is a process that
conforms to a defined workflow and is performed in a distributed manner with the aid
of an inspection tool. Tool support for software inspection evolved in 1990s and
during this evolution the principles of distributed and asynchronous inspections were
outlined [5]. Instead of a fixed process model, virtual inspection tools should provide
capabilities for customizing the process for an individual organization or project [6].
Virtual software inspection process can include asynchronous and synchronous
phases through a network but conventional face to face meetings can be included if
required. The synchronous activities of inspection include discussion of correlated
290 D. Mishra and A. Mishra
faults, reaching a consensus on the faults, recording the action items, and determining
the inspection’s status [11]. Teleconferencing and video-conferencing tools can be
used for discussion purpose among participants. Traditional face-to-face discussions
suffer from a number of process losses such as air-time fragmentation, blocking,
evaluation apprehension, domination and free-riding [14]. Asynchronous computer-
mediated communication systems tend to promote richer discussions than face-to-face
exchanges but present additional coordination challenges to team members working
in this environment [1]. Although asynchronous communication could be more
efficient in promoting more carefully worded comments or more balanced
participation, it could be less desirable due to the difficulty of conceptually integrating
divergent contributions in order to produce the expected outcome [14]. The two main
asynchronous activities of software inspection are the individual reviews and the
producer’s (authors of documents and codes) correlation of faults [11].
An inspection tool is a software package particularly designed for inspection
collaboration, and it should be capable of at least managing and delivering the
inspection documentation on-line, enabling the effortless recording of defects and
automatic gathering of defects [6]. The objective of inspection is to locate potential
defects (faults), not correct them. On-line inspection related material reduces
paperwork, makes the latest material available to participants and thus facilitates in
meeting. Material used in inspection includes the target material, the inspection-
criteria list (check list), individual fault lists, the merged fault list, the action-item list,
and the status report [11]. The inspection information can be used for review and
metrics collection to monitor the quality assurance. An inspection tool should support
metrics and automate the collection, storage and analysis of the necessary data [7].
Hedberg and Lappalainen [7] further argued that to encourage process improvement, it
must be possible to calculate the derived metrics automatically, and the set of metrics
must be flexible enough to focus on the most important aspects of a given situation.
There are three significant aspects to be taken care of in virtual software inspection [6]:
a. Tools that enable efficient running of the process. Independence of time and
place, on-line recording of issues and data management can be achieved through
network tools.
b. Flexibility of the process and supporting tools to ensure tolerable adoption
effort and acceptance of the method.
c. Interoperability of the processes and tools, to enable convenient everyday use
of the method and improves the effectiveness of inspections.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents related works
of distributed software inspection tools. Section 3 describes global software
inspection process. Section 4 provides details of global software inspection tool.
Section 5 presents advantages and limitations of the proposed process and tool.
Section 6 concludes with conclusion and future work.
2 Literature Review
In distributed software development, effective inspection process lead to increased
correctness of analysis of results which is critical for success of the project. Stein
A Software Inspection Process for Globally Distributed Teams 291
et al. [16] found that distributed, asynchronous software inspection is feasible, cost
effective means of collaboration for geographically distributed software development
teams and suggested web-based tool Asynchronous Inspector of Software Artifacts
(AISA) for such purpose. AISA was one of the first web-based software inspection
tools. This is also supported by Mashayekhi et al. [11] that cost-effectiveness of
inspection would be improved further by a distributed collaborative meeting
environment that eliminates the need for face to face meetings. They reported
Collaborative Software Inspection (CSI) project to work from separate locations.
Caivano et al. [2] proposed Internet-Based Inspection System (IBIS) to support
scalable and distributed software inspections. Tervonen et al. [17] introduced WiT
(Web inspection Tool) towards virtual meetings and on-line recording of artefacts,
checklists and other related documents. Based on the analysis of 16 tools and their
experience Hedberg and Harjumaa [6] concluded that flexibility and integration are
two most significant features for implementing the next generation of inspection
tools. According to Harjumaa et al. [4], there are two reasons for the full utilization of
inspection software being extremely challenging: the variety of the inspection
material qualities, and interfaces with other development tools and procedures. In
most distributed inspection tools which are based on web, web services and servers
are usually very limited and kept isolated from production system for security reasons
along with great deal of manual work towards control of an inspection tool [4].
Computerized software tools are the essence of the distributed software inspection
process. Hedberg and Harjumaa [6] discussed the concept and features of virtual
software inspections for distributed software projects and observed that document
management for interoperability and mechanism for workflow control should be
integral part of distributed software inspection tool. Recently, Calefato and Lanubile
[3] reported about EConference - a distributed conferencing system which can be
used as collaboration tool for distributed meetings.
Although this area has been studied intensively and numerous implementations
exist, no tool has achieved a break-through. As distributed aspect has become more
and more relevant in software development, therefore, the need for tools is now
greater than ever [5]. Here, we have extended our previous work [12, 13] by including
global software inspection process to provide effective means for geographically
distributed work groups.
3 Global Software Inspection Process
Currently an updated and improved version of global software inspection process is
used by automating the inspection and meeting processes. Various stages of global
software inspection process are shown in figure 1.
The inspection process begins when entry criteria are satisfied. The main entry
criterion is that the product to be inspected is complete and mature enough to be used
after the defects will be removed. The author informs the software quality team leader
about the completion of the product that will be inspected.
292 D. Mishra and A. Mishra
Fig. 1. Stages in Global Software Inspection Process
Setup Stage: In the setup stage, the inspection team leader selects the members of the
inspection team and generates an inspection plan. Then, the document to be inspected
as well as other necessary documents i.e. checklists, are uploaded on the tool by the
leader. The leader can also send an email to the members regarding the details of the
planned inspection that also includes their responsibility, deadlines etc., via the tool.
The leader can also put an announcement consisting these details on the tool itself.
Individual Inspection Stage: Inspectors inspect the product independently with the
help of checklists provided in the tool and store their comments on the web-based
tool. Inspection is done according to the checklists appropriate for the inspected
product, like the code review checklist, requirements inspection checklist or design
review checklist. These checklists are available to inspectors in the tool. Inspectors
cannot see each others comments because it may influence them. The inspection team
leader can see all comments entered by every inspector.
Meeting Stage: In this stage, all inspectors, including the leader, get together to have
online inspection meeting via the tool. The timing of the meeting is intimated to the
team by the leader either by via e-mail or by posting an announcement. They discuss
defects they have found during the individual inspection stage. These discussions help
in identifying the true defects and eliminating the false defects from the defect list.
Then a final defect list is made by the leader which is then emailed to the author.
Rework Stage: In this stage, the author of the product performs a rework over the
materials to correct them. The author updates the product according to the final defect
A Software Inspection Process for Globally Distributed Teams 293
list and takes notes next to every defect explaining what changes have been done
along with their locations.
Follow-up Stage: The inspection team leader or one of the inspectors performs a
follow-up to ensure that every issue is addressed and every defect is corrected. If all
defects are not removed, the product is given back to the author to correct them, so
the product goes back to Rework Stage.
4 Global Software Inspection Tool
The global software inspection process was automated by developing a tool as shown
in figure 2. This tool is developed with PHP, MySQL, and Apache Server. The
primary elements are termed as “actors”, and the processes are termed as “use cases”.
There are three types of actors: admin, inspection team leader, and inspectors.
Admin is an actor and the use cases of the actor are:
• Start a new inspection project
• Assign permissions for a specific project
• Revoke permissions
Leader is an actor and leader can also play the role of inspector at the same time. The
use cases of the leader are:
• Assign inspectors to a new inspection project
• Upload documents for inspection including checklists etc.
• Download documents for inspection
• Add announcements for the inspection team
• Delete announcements
• The leader adds a comment for a document
• The leader deletes a comment made by him/her.
• The leader updates a comment made by him/her.
• List comments made by inspectors
• Start meeting
• Approve a comment
• Disapprove a comment
• Finish meeting
• Create log of meetings
• Create logs of approved comments
• Delete inspectors from the project
• Finish project
Inspector is an actor and the use cases of this actor are:
• Inspector downloads documents for inspection
• Inspector adds a comment for a document
• Inspector deletes a comment made by him/her.
• Inspector updates a comment made by him/her.
294 D. Mishra and A. Mishra
• Inspector enters an inspection meeting
• Create log of meetings
• Create logs of approved comments
Fig. 2. global Software Inspection Tool
5 Advantages and Limitations of the Proposed Process
Some of the advantages are:
• This model is asynchronous. Inspectors inspect the product or part of the
product independently without coming together at one place and send their
comments via a web-based tool.
• Inspection meeting is done online through the tool without coming together
physically. If an inspector can not login during the meeting time, He/she can
still download the log of the meeting to know the details about the meeting.
• This inspection method is automated by developing a web-based tool so it
eliminates lots of labor-intensive paperwork. Total inspection and meeting
time is reduced, people resource is saved. Paper usage is reduced towards
green computing.
A Software Inspection Process for Globally Distributed Teams 295
• Due to the usage of tool in this inspection method, getting the inspection data
from the past projects is easier. This data can be helpful for the estimation of
time, cost and resource for inspection in future projects. Also it can be used
to further improve the inspection process.
• All the checklists are available in the tool which helps inspectors in terms of
efficiency and productivity.
• This inspection process includes early life cycle artifacts (for example,
requirements) along with inspection of code.
The Limitations are:
• Many studies suggest that face-to-face meeting is best to find defects in
complex software development problems. In the proposed process, although
meeting is done online with the help of tool but, if required, face-to-face
meeting can be organized.
6 Conclusion
Due to the proliferation of distributed software development, the role of virtual
software inspection will be more significant in the future. Distributed software
development projects can not make use of traditional methods although their
communication and quality assurance needs are the same. Integration with data
repositories, project and version management system will enhance the importance of
software inspection. Web technology facilitates the collaborative aspects of
inspection. Apart from the flexibility of the inspection meetings it also enables easy,
manageable distribution of the artifacts for inspection, including the checklists and
other related documents. The proposed global software inspection process with tool
support has been implemented in a software organization. As a future work it is
planned to compare this process and tool support with existing distributed inspection
process towards further improvement.
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