Design and code inspections to reduce errors in program development

TLDR

Effective program development requires planning, measurement, and control, achieved by defining operations with exit criteria, measuring product completeness through inspections or testing, and using the data to guide the process. This paper explains how inspections influence the planning, measurement, and control functions in programming. Inspections have been successfully applied across projects of varying scale, improving predictability, productivity, and product quality without hindering development.

Abstract

Successful management of any process requires planning, measurement, and control. In programming development, these requirements translate into defining the programming process in terms of a series of operations, each operation having its own exit criteria. Next there must be some means of measuring completeness of the product at any point of its development by inspections or testing. And finally, the measured data must be used for controlling the process. This approach is not only conceptually interesting, but has been applied successfully in several programming projects embracing systems and applications programming, both large and small. It has not been found to "get in the way" of programming, but has instead enabled higher predictability than other means, and the use of inspections has improved productivity and product quality. The purpose of this paper is to explain the planning, measurement, and control functions as they are affected by inspections in programming terms.