Investigating the impact of reading techniques on the accuracy of different defect content estimation techniques

Software inspections have established an impressive track record for early defect detection and correction. To increase their benefits, recent research efforts have focused on two different areas: systematic reading techniques and defect content estimation techniques. While reading techniques are to provide guidance for inspection participants on how to scrutinize a software artifact in a systematic manner, defect content estimation techniques aim at controlling and evaluating the inspection process by providing an estimate of the total number of defects in an inspected document. Although several empirical studies have been conducted to evaluate the accuracy of defect content estimation techniques, only few consider the reading approach as an influential factor. In this paper we examine the impact of two specific reading techniques - a scenario-based reading technique and checklist-based reading - on the accuracy of different defect content estimation techniques. The examination is based on data that were collected in a large experiment with students of the Vienna University of Technology. The results suggest that the choice of the reading technique has little impact on the accuracy of defect content estimation techniques. Although more empirical work is necessary to corroborate this finding, it implies that practitioners can use defect content estimation techniques without any consideration of their current reading technique

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Capture-Recapture Models for Estimating Software Defect Content

An important requirement to control the inspection of software artifacts is to be able to decide, based on more objective information, whether the inspection can stop or whether it should continue to achieve a suitable level of artifact quality. A prediction of the number of remaining defects in an inspected artifact can be used for decision making. Several studies in software engineering have considered capture-recapture models, originally proposed by biologists to estimate animal populations, to make a prediction. However, few studies compare the actual number of remaining defects to the one predicted by a capture-recapture model on real software engineering artifacts. Thus, there is little work looking at the robustness of capture-recapture models under realistic software engineering conditions, where it is expected that some of their assumptions will be violated. Simulations have been performed but no definite conclusions can be drawn regarding the degree of accuracy of such models under realistic inspection conditions, and the factors affecting this accuracy. Furthermore, the existing studies focused on a subset of the existing capture-recapture models. Thus a more exhaustive comparison is still missing. In this study, we focus on traditional inspections and estimate, based on actual inspections' data, the degree of accuracy of relevant, state-of-the-art capture-recapture models, as they have been proposed in biology and for which statistical estimators exist. In order to assess their robustness, we look at the impact of the number of inspectors and the number of actual defects on the estimators' accuracy based on actual inspection data. Our results show that models are strongly affected by the number of inspectors and, therefore, one must consider this factor befo..

The Design, Manufacture and Characterisation of Novel Medical Device Coatings using Cellulose Polymers

In this paper we present a systematic check of the conformance of the implemented and the intended software architecture. Nowadays industry is confronted with rapidly evolving embedded systems. In order to effectively reuse design artefacts such as requirements, architectural views and analysis, as well as the code base, it is important to have a consistent overview in each phase of the development process. In this paper we propose a conformance check framework that combines a colloquial engineering model and a conformance check system based on commodity technology, albeit the model and the system can be used in their own right. An academic experiment exemplifies the application of our framewor