Enhancing human-machine pair inspection with risk number and code inspection diagram

Abstract

AbstractSoftware inspection is a widely-used approach to software quality assurance. Human-Machine Pair Inspection (HMPI) is a novel software inspection technology proposed in our previous work, which is characterized by machine guiding programmers to inspect their own code during programming. While our previous studies have shown the effectiveness of HMPI in telling risky code fragments to the programmer, little attention has been paid to the issue of how the programmer can be effectively guided to carry out inspections. To address this important problem, in this paper we propose to combine Risk Number with Code Inspection Diagram (CID) to provide accurate guidance for the programmer to efficiently carry out inspections of his/her own programs. By following the Code Inspection Diagram, the programmer will inspect every checking item shown in the CID to efficiently determine whether it actually contain bugs. We describe a case study to evaluate the performance of this method by comparing its inspection time and number of detected errors with our previous work. The result shows that the method is likely to guide the programmer to inspect the faulty code earlier and be more efficient in detecting defects than the previous HMPI established based on Cognitive Complexity.