A Tool for Automated Inspection of Software Design Documents and its Empirical Evaluation in an Aviation Industry Setting

Abstract

While software inspection is an effective activity to detect defects early in the software development lifecycle, it is an effort-intensive and error-prone activity. Motivated by a real need in the context of the Turkish Aerospace Industries Inc. (TAI), a tool named AutoInspect was developed to (semi-) automate the inspection of software design documents and, as a result, to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the inspection process. We present in this paper the features of the tool, its development details and its initial evaluation for inspecting the design documents of three real systems in the company. The results of the initial case-study reveal that the tool is indeed able to increase the inspections efficiency and effectiveness. In terms of efficiency, inspection engineers who used AutoInspect performed 41-50% more efficiently, for the three design documents under study, compared to the case when the tool was not used (i.e., manual inspections). In terms of effectiveness, compared to manual inspections, the automated approach found between 23-33% more defects in the three design documents under study. As the tool currently only provides partial automation, our efforts are currently underway to increase its automation level even further.