A case study of reading techniques in a software company

Software inspection is an efficient method to detect faults early in the software lifecycle. This has been shown in several empirical studies together with experiments on reading techniques. However, experiments in industrial settings are often considered expensive for a software organization. Hence, many evaluations are performed in the academic environment with artificial documents. In this paper, we describe an empirical study in a software organization where a requirements document under development is used to compare two reading techniques. There are several benefits as well as drawbacks of using this kind of approach, which are extensively discussed in the paper. The reading techniques compared is the standard technique used in the organization (checklist-based) with the test perspective of perspective-based reading. The main result is that the test perspective of perspective-based reading seems more effective and efficient than the company standard method. The impact of this study is that the software organization will apply the new reading technique in future requirements inspections.