Tool support for geographically dispersed inspection teams

Abstract

Software inspection is one of software engineering's best practices for detecting and removing defects early in the development process. However, the prevalence of manual activities and face-to-face meetings within software inspections hinder their applicability in the context of global software development, where software engineering activities are spread across multiple sites and even multiple countries.In this article, we describe a web-based tool, called the Internet-Based Inspection System (IBIS), that aims to support geographically dispersed inspection teams. On the basis of findings from empirical studies of software inspections, the IBIS tool adopts a reengineered inspection process to minimize synchronous activities and coordination problems. We present the underlying process model, how the tool is used within the inspection stages, and experiences using the IBIS tool as the enabling infrastructure for distributed software inspections.

Comparing distributed and face-to-face meetings for software architecture evaluation: A controlled experiment

“…These results are consistent with the empirical findings of the use of groupware systems in other activities of software development, i.e. Requirements Engineering (Boeham et al 2001;Damian et al 2000) and software inspection (Genuchten et al 2001;Lanubile et al 2003).…”

Global Software Engineering: The Future of Socio-technical Coordination

“…Spanjers et al [66] built a specialized tool for GSD build and test, which allows remote sites to observe execution, access reports and work products, and makes the test procedures available and visible. Lanubile et al [46] designed a tool to support distributed, largely asynchronous inspections.…”

Tool Support for Distributed Software Engineering

“…Lanubile et al [12] present a web-based support system for distributed software inspection that supports both synchronous and asynchronous communication between the inspectors.…”