Our lives and the quality of our lives increasingly depend on the affordability, reliability, and availability of software. Emergency phone systems, advanced medical systems, military weapon systems, airplane navigation systems, and even household appliances depend on software. Improving the software development process is therefore vitally important to us all.
Software inspections are very different from manufactured product inspections.
Manufacturing inspections typically occur after a product is complete, whereas software inspections occur during development, providing early feedback on product quality. While the software inspection process does not solve all software development problems, strong evidence shows that it helps to improve overall software product quality. In this book you will find detailed descriptions of the inspection process, explanations of how inspections improve software development practices, and documented practical results that have been achieved using inspections. Our intent is to give readers an easy to-use source of inspection reference material, organized by general category, and to explain how these different articles correlate. The intended audience for this book ranges from software developers to researchers, including those involved in defining or improving software development processes.