Software inspection

Inspection in software engineering, refers to peer review of any work product by trained individuals who look for defects using a well defined process. An inspection might also be referred to as a Fagan inspection after Michael Fagan, the creator of a very popular software inspection process.

An inspection is one of the most common sorts of review practices found in software projects. The goal of the inspection is to identify defects. Commonly inspected work products include software requirements specifications and test plans. In an inspection, a work product is selected for review and a team is gathered for an inspection meeting to review the work product. A moderator is chosen to moderate the meeting. Each inspector prepares for the meeting by reading the work product and noting each defect. In an inspection, a defect is any part of the work product that will keep an inspector from approving it. For example, if the team is inspecting a software requirements specification, each defect will be text in the document which an inspector disagrees with.

The inspection process was developed in the mid-1970s and it has later been extended and modified.

The process should have entry criteria that determine if the inspection process is ready to begin. This prevents unfinished work products from entering the inspection process. The entry criteria might be a checklist including items such as "The document has been spell-checked".

The stages in the inspections process are: Planning, Overview meeting, Preparation, Inspection meeting, Rework and Follow-up. The Preparation, Inspection meeting and Rework stages might be iterated.

The process is ended by the moderator when it satisfies some predefined exit criteria. The term inspection refers to one of the most important elements of the entire process that surrounds the execution and successful completion of a software engineering project.

During an inspection the following roles are used.

A code review can be done as a special kind of inspection in which the team examines a sample of code and fixes any defects in it. In a code review, a defect is a block of code which does not properly implement its requirements, which does not function as the programmer intended, or which is not incorrect but could be improved (for example, it could be made more readable or its performance could be improved). In addition to helping teams find and fix bugs, code reviews are useful for both cross-training programmers on the code being reviewed and for helping junior developers learn new programming techniques.

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