Code Inspections
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URL: http://forum.onestoptesting.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=2955
Printed Date: 17Jan2025 at 9:31am
Topic: Code Inspections
Posted By: tanushree
Subject: Code Inspections
Date Posted: 17Oct2007 at 3:35am
Code Inspections
An
inspection team usually consists of four people. One of the four people
plays the role of a moderator. The moderator is expected to be a
competent programmer, but he/she is not the author of the program and
need not be acquainted with the details of the program. The duties of
the moderator include:
• Distributing materials for scheduling inspections
• Leading the session,
• Recording all errors found, and
• Ensuring that the errors are subsequently corrected.
Hence
the moderator may be called as quality-control engineer. The remaining
members usually consist of the program’s designer and a test specialist.
The
general procedure is that the moderator distributes the program’s
listing and design specification to the other participants well in
advance of the inspection session. The participants are expected to
familiarize themselves with the material prior to the session. During
inspection session, two main activities occur:
1. The
programmer is requested to narrate, statement by statement, the logic
of the program. During the discourse, questions are raised and pursued
to determine if errors exist. Experience has shown that many of the
errors discovered are actually found by the programmer, rather than the
other team members, during the narration. In other words, the simple
act of reading aloud one’s program to an audience seems to be a
remarkably effective error-detection technique.
2. The program
is analyzed with respect to a checklist of historically common
programming errors (such a checklist is discussed in the next section).
It
is moderators responsibility to ensure the smooth conduction of the
proceedings and that the participants focus their attention on finding
errors, not correcting them.
After session, the programmer is
given a list of the errors found. The list of errors is also analyzed,
categorized, ad used to refine the error checklist to improve the
effectiveness of future inspections.
The main benefits of this method are;
• Identifying early errors,
• The
programmers usually receive feedback concerning his or her programming
style and choice of algorithms and programming techniques.
• Other participants are also gain in similar way by being exposed to another programmer’s errors and programming style.
• The
inspection process is a way of identifying early the most error-prone
sections of the program, thus allowing one to focus more attention on
these sections during the computer based testing processes.
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