13,889 research outputs found
An Experiment to Assess the Cost-Benefits of Code Inspections in Large Scale Software Development
We are conducting a long-term experiment (in progress) to compare
the costs and benefits of several different software inspection methods.
These methods are being applied by professional developers to a
commercial software product they are currently writing.
Because the laboratory for this experiment is a live development
effort, we took special care to minimize cost and risk to the project,
while maximizing our ability to gather useful data.
This article has several goals: (1) to describe the experiment's
design and show how we used simulation techniques to optimize it, (2) to
present our preliminary results and discuss their implications for both
software practitioners and researchers, and (3) to discuss how we expect
to modify the experiment in order to reduce potential risks to the project.
For each inspection we randomly assign 3 independent variables:
(1) the number of reviewers on each inspection team (1, 2 or 4), (2) the
number of teams inspecting the code unit (1 or 2), and (3) the
requirement that defects be repaired between the first and second team's
inspections. The reviewers for each inspection are randomly selected
without replacement from a pool of 11 experienced software developers.
The dependent variables for each inspection include inspection interval
(elapsed time), total effort, and the defect detection rate.
To date we have completed 34 of the planned 64 inspections. Our
preliminary results challenge certain long-held beliefs about the most
cost-effective ways to conduct inspections and raise some questions about
the feasibility of recently proposed methods.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-14
Proceedings of the 19th Annual Software Engineering Workshop
The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) is an organization sponsored by NASA/GSFC and created to investigate the effectiveness of software engineering technologies when applied to the development of applications software. The goals of the SEL are: (1) to understand the software development process in the GSFC environment; (2) to measure the effects of various methodologies, tools, and models on this process; and (3) to identify and then to apply successful development practices. The activities, findings, and recommendations of the SEL are recorded in the Software Engineering Laboratory Series, a continuing series of reports that include this document
Are Delayed Issues Harder to Resolve? Revisiting Cost-to-Fix of Defects throughout the Lifecycle
Many practitioners and academics believe in a delayed issue effect (DIE);
i.e. the longer an issue lingers in the system, the more effort it requires to
resolve. This belief is often used to justify major investments in new
development processes that promise to retire more issues sooner.
This paper tests for the delayed issue effect in 171 software projects
conducted around the world in the period from 2006--2014. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the largest study yet published on this effect. We found no
evidence for the delayed issue effect; i.e. the effort to resolve issues in a
later phase was not consistently or substantially greater than when issues were
resolved soon after their introduction.
This paper documents the above study and explores reasons for this mismatch
between this common rule of thumb and empirical data. In summary, DIE is not
some constant across all projects. Rather, DIE might be an historical relic
that occurs intermittently only in certain kinds of projects. This is a
significant result since it predicts that new development processes that
promise to faster retire more issues will not have a guaranteed return on
investment (depending on the context where applied), and that a long-held truth
in software engineering should not be considered a global truism.Comment: 31 pages. Accepted with minor revisions to Journal of Empirical
Software Engineering. Keywords: software economics, phase delay, cost to fi
A NASA-wide approach toward cost-effective, high-quality software through reuse
NASA Langley Research Center sponsored the second Workshop on NASA Research in Software Reuse on May 5-6, 1992 at the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The workshop was hosted by the Research Triangle Institute. Participants came from the three NASA centers, four NASA contractor companies, two research institutes and the Air Force's Rome Laboratory. The purpose of the workshop was to exchange information on software reuse tool development, particularly with respect to tool needs, requirements, and effectiveness. The participants presented the software reuse activities and tools being developed and used by their individual centers and programs. These programs address a wide range of reuse issues. The group also developed a mission and goals for software reuse within NASA. This publication summarizes the presentations and the issues discussed during the workshop
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