Scenes of Software Inspections:
Video Dramatizations for the Classroom
by Lionel E. Deimel
In the software engineering community, there is widespread consensus that the
effective generation of software artifacts—and particularly code—can be
improved using some formal review technique wherein the artifacts are carefully
examined by human readers for defects. Such reviews are often called software
inspections, though other names are sometimes used. The details of the process
have often been the subject of quasi-religious arguments and have too seldom
been the object
of empirical investigation. By whatever name and however practiced,  software
inspections remain a powerful software engineering tool, albeit one that seems
very resource-intensive.
In 1991, while I was a Senior Computer Scientist at the Software Engineering
Institute, I created an “educational materials package” on the subject
of software inspections. The package consists of a videotape and a report. The
videotape contains a series of vignettes depicting how and how not to conduct an
inspection. The scenes were originally created for an interactive CD-ROM
technology called Digital Video Interactive that never quite got off the ground.
I rescued the scenes from their technological black hole, put them into a more
conventional format, and wrote a short report on inspections and how the scenes
could be used to teach about inspections. Scenes of Software Inspections:
Video Dramatizations for the Classroom (citation) may be less compelling as a report
than as a report with videotape, but visitors may still appreciate being able to
read the written material by itself.
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Scenes of Software Inspections:
Video Dramatizations for the Classroom (PDF) |
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— LED, 5/31/2007
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