A tool to support perspective based approach to software code inspection

摘要

It is widely accepted that code inspection is one of the more cost effective forms of testing. It requires a group of inspectors coming together to find defects in an inspection artifact. However, as inspection artifacts grow larger and more complicated, the burden of conducting the code inspection process outweighs the benefits that it provides. Even with the help of automated tools, the process itself has become inefficient as it consumes a large amount of limited resources. Therefore, there has been much research focus on improving the reading technique, which makes a significant impact on the quality of the inspection. In this paper, we discuss the perspective-based reading technique and its benefits to object-oriented projects. We also discuss the need for a new inspection tool and this leads us to propose a tool that supports the perspective-based reading technique with the use of UML design diagrams. This tool supports perspective-based reading technique by matching scenarios in the form of design diagrams to source code and subsequently searching for discrepancies between the two. The use of design diagrams avoids overlapping of inspection effort; thus, increases the efficiency of code inspection even for large projects. We explain how the tool makes the more effort-driven perspective-based reading technique relatively easy as compared to doing it manually.