Comparing the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Inspections and Walkthroughs

The success of a software project depends heavily on the quality of its work products and deliverables. Quality of software can be judged by using a number of quality assurance tools like peer reviews and testing. This study focuses on two popular team-based peer review techniques called inspections and walkthroughs. A controlled experiment is designed and conducted to compare the defect detection effectiveness and efficiency of these two peer review techniques. Three different types of software artifacts – software requirements specification (SRS), code, and test cases – of multiple real-life industry projects are subjected to both types of peer reviews. A comparison of experiment results indicates that inspections were more effective (at least 1.54 times) than walkthroughs in detecting defects in all three artifacts while requiring only a slightly longer timeframe (1.13 - 1.31 times more hours). Therefore, an additional time investment in the case of employing inspections would be paid back by an improvement in the quality of software via an increase in the effectiveness of defect detection.