Assessing the Cost-Effectiveness of Inspections by Combining Project Data and Expert Opinion

There is a general agreement among software engineering practitioners that software inspections are an important technique to achieve high software quality at a reasonable cost. However, there are many ways to perform such inspections and many factors that affect their costeffectiveness. It is therefore important to be able to estimate this cost-effectiveness in order to monitor it, improve it, and convince developers and management that the technology and related investments are worthwhile. This work proposes a rigorous but practical way to do so. In particular, a meaningful model to measure costeffectiveness is selected and a method to determine the cost-effectiveness by combining project data and expert opinion is proposed. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, the results of a large-scale industrial case study are presented. Keywords Software inspection, cost-effectiveness, expert knowledge elicitation, Monte-Carlo simulation

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ISSRE
• Authors: Lionel C. Briand, Bernd G. Freimut, Ferdinand Vollei
• Keywords: Cost-effectiveness, ISSRE 2000, Software Engineering, Software Engineering Practitioners, Software Inspection