Fagan inspection

A Fagan inspection is a structured process of trying to find in development documents such as programming code, specifications, designs and others during various phases of the software development process. It is named after Michael Fagan, who is credited with being the inventor of formal software inspections.

Fagan Inspection defines a process as a certain activity with a pre-specified entry and exit criteria. In every activity or operation for which entry and exit criteria are specified Fagan Inspections can be used to validate if the output of the process complies with the exit criteria specified for the process. Fagan Inspection uses a group review method to evaluate the output of a given process.

Examples of activities for which Fagan Inspection can be used are:

The software development process is a typical application of Fagan Inspection; software development process is a series of operations which will deliver a certain end product and consists of operations like requirements definition, design, coding up to testing and maintenance. As the costs to remedy a defect are up to 10-100 times less in the early operations compared to fixing a defect in the maintenance phase it is essential to find defects as close to the point of insertion as possible. This is done by inspecting the output of each operation and comparing that to the output requirements, or exit-criteria of that operation.

Entry criteria are the criteria or requirements which must be met to enter a specific process. For example for Fagan inspections the high- and low-level documents must comply with specific entry-criteria before they can be used for a formal inspection process.

Exit criteria are the criteria or requirements which must be met to complete a specific process. For example for Fagan inspections the low-level document must comply with specific exit-criteria (as specified in the high-level document) before the development process can be taken to the next phase.

The exit-criteria are specified in a high-level document, which is then used as the standard to compare the operation result (low-level document) to during the inspections. Deviations of the low-level document from the requirements specified in the high-level document are called defects and can be categorized in Major Defects and Minor Defects.

According to M.E. Fagan, “A defect is an instance in which a requirement is not satisfied.”

...
Wikipedia