Abstract
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 cost-effectiveness. 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 cost-effectiveness is proposed and a method to determine cost-effectiveness by combining project data and expert opinion is described. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, the results of a large-scale industrial case study are presented and an initial validation is performed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1074-1092 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue number | 12 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Dec 2005 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Case study
- Cost-effectiveness model
- Expert opinion
- Monte Carlo simulation
- Software inspection