Peer Reviews (Inspections)

Delivery: 1/2-day live workshop (online or onsite)

Are errors getting in the way of your product development? Many organizations spend 25-75% of their resources on rework. Rework is expensive, causing delays, and buggy products hurt a company’s image every day.

Inspections are small team sessions designed to find defects in code and documentation. Our inspection process concentrates on finding defects quickly, cost-effectively and early in the development process.

Workshop Results

In this workshop, students bring a variety of documents and code to inspect. On their first attempt, students typically observe the following results:

• 37 critical or major defects per Thousand Lines of Non-commented Source Code (KLOC).
• 3.3 critical or major defects per effort-hour expended in the inspection process. In comparison, testing typically finds 0.3 defects per effort-hour. This is an 11X improvement.
• 4 critical defects per page for designs, plans and specifications.
• On average when teams inspect code, 57% of them find between 6 and 12 critical defects per KLOC. In many cases, the code has already been tested and shipped with critical defects such as memory leaks, incorrect variable names, logic errors and incorrect path names. These defects are difficult to find in test.

An inspection differs from a walkthrough or review in that it eliminates personality conflicts while keeping unnecessary verbal exchanges to a minimum. The result is a process that is much faster, friendlier, more efficient and far less intimidating.

Inspection also provides you with statistical data on defects and improvements, allowing you to measure and record efficiency.

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“The Inspection course has been successfully adopted by our software organization of approximately 120. The inspection process concentrates on finding defects in an efficient and non-emotional way. It is straightforward, easy to assimilate, and can quickly be implemented.”

– Mike Wood, Development Manager, Xerox, California.

“Inspections are an important part of our software verification activities at Medtronic. The Process Group has provided the training we need to assure effective inspections. We have been very pleased with the classes they have taught.”

– Sherman Eagles, Technical Fellow, Medtronic, Minnesota.

“The Inspection course provided by The Process Group was excellent. It had the right mix of theory and practical exercises.”

– Cindy Tutt, Computing Devices Canada, Ontario.

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The Benefits Of This Workshop

After completing the workshop, you will be ready to start conducting inspections and realizing the following benefits immediately:

Find defects in products before they become problems:

• focus staff on finding defects early, rather than at the end of product development
• stop wasting time on unnecessary product fixes and work on new development

Avoid the personality conflicts associated with reviews and walkthroughs:

• avoid wasted time
• avoid an author’s natural defensiveness

Monitor the efficiency of your inspections:

• use objective criteria to record the time and costs you’ve saved
• use simple metrics to determine product quality

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