Can using Fagan Inspections improve the quality of specification in 2011? A Case Study

In this paper, we explore why Fagan Inspections have become obsolete in the software industry, given the body of evidence which supports their use to improve the quality of software artefacts and the software development process. Since the late 1970’s, much has been written about how Fagan Inspections improve the quality of both processes and outputs of the software development process. The literature indicates that the Fagan Inspection technique can improve quality of software (or other software development artefacts) by a reduction in defects of 60 – 90%. However, recent literature suggests that inspection techniques in general and Fagan Inspections in particular, are no longer used. A study in 1998 found that respondents used inspections either irregularly or not at all. Teams often review artefacts informally, but believe that they are performing an inspection or formal review. The lack of rigour in the review process results in reduced benefits and more defects in the artefacts. To explore this situation, we conducted a case study with a local enterprise and we report on the early findings. These suggest that the introduction of Fagan Inspections may have a number of benefits before they have even been introduced fully, including recognition of flaws in the current development process, development of technical knowledge relating to the software process domain, and improved team relations and a ‘quality’ culture. In addition, the personnel using Fagan Inspection gain experience in the production of ‘quality’ artefacts

Autonomous 3D Exploration of Large Structures Using an UAV Equipped with a 2D LIDAR

This paper addressed the challenge of exploring large, unknown, and unstructured industrial environments with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The resulting system combined well-known components and techniques with a new manoeuvre to use a low-cost 2D laser to measure a 3D structure. Our approach combined frontier-based exploration, the Lazy Theta* path planner, and a flyby sampling manoeuvre to create a 3D map of large scenarios. One of the novelties of our system is that all the algorithms relied on the multi-resolution of the octomap for the world representation. We used a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HitL) simulation environment to collect accurate measurements of the capability of the open-source system to run online and on-board the UAV in real-time. Our approach is compared to different reference heuristics under this simulation environment showing better performance in regards to the amount of explored space. With the proposed approach, the UAV is able to explore 93% of the search space under 30 min, generating a path without repetition that adjusts to the occupied space covering indoor locations, irregular structures, and suspended obstaclesUnión Europea Marie Sklodowska-Curie 64215Unión Europea MULTIDRONE (H2020-ICT-731667)Uniión Europea HYFLIERS (H2020-ICT-779411