The Web generation of software inspection: a process with virtual meetings and on-line recording

Face-to-face meetings typically provide a natural way of negotiating and collecting opinions. The problem is that these meetings also cause resource problems, i.e. they waste time and are difficult to arrange. A shift to more flexible implementations of meetings is thus an understandable alternative. We could then remove barriers to the inclusion of inspections in the development process. The present paper outlines a solution to this problem and introduces a web generation of inspections, which utilises the collaborative aspects of the latest web technology, such as virtual (distributed) meetings and online recording. Web technology facilitates the collaborative aspects of inspection. This not only introduces flexibility into the inspection meetings, but also enables easy, manageable distribution of the artefacts for inspection, including the document to be inspected, checklists, or any other related documents. We introduce in particular the WiT (Web inspection Tool) tool, the main feature of which is the ability to inspect any HTML document.