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An Empirical Study on Design Quality Improvement from Best-Practice Inspection and Pair Programming

  • Conference paper
Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 4034))

Abstract

The quality of the software design often has a major impact on the quality of the final product and the effort for development and evolution. A number of quality assurance (QA) approaches for inspection of early-life-cycle documents have been empirically evaluated. An implicit assumption of these studies was: an investment into early defect detection and removal saves higher rework cost. The concept of pair programming combines software construction with implicit QA in the development team. For planning QA activities, an important research question is how effective inspectors can be expected to be at detecting defects in software (design and code) documents compared to programmers who find defects as by-product of their usual construction activities.

In this paper we present an initial empirical study that compares the defect detection effectiveness of a best-practice inspection technique with defect detection as by-product of constructive software evolution tasks during pair programming. Surprisingly, in the study context pair programmers were more effective to find defects in design documents than inspectors. However, when building a larger team for defect detection, a mix of inspection and pair programming can be expected to work better than any single technique.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Software Technology, Vienna University of Technology, Karlsplatz 13, A-1040, Vienna, Austria

    Dietmar Winkler & Stefan Biffl

Authors
  1. Dietmar Winkler
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  2. Stefan Biffl
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Fraunhofer-Platz 1, 67663, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Jürgen Münch

  2. VTT Electronics, Kaitovayla 1, 90570, Oulu, Finland

    Matias Vierimaa

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Winkler, D., Biffl, S. (2006). An Empirical Study on Design Quality Improvement from Best-Practice Inspection and Pair Programming. In: Münch, J., Vierimaa, M. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4034. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11767718_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11767718_27

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-34682-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-34683-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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