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High Quality Low Cost Software Inspections, Ronald A. Radice, Paradoxicon Publishing, Andover, MA (2002). 479 pp. (ISBN 0-9645913-1-6).
This book by Ronald Radice describes the author's 28 years of experience defining, using, and teaching the software inspection process. He states that his goal is to first focus on the effectiveness and then on the efficiency of inspections. Inspection effectiveness is how to find the most defects as early as possible at controlled and low costs. Inspection efficiency is finding the most defects at an increasingly lower cost to continue ROI (return on investment) improvement for the inspection processes. The book is very complete on the subject of inspection, covering software inspection history, inspection process definition and evolution, inspection economics, management, practical issues, where to start, what to inspect, other possible approaches, and the future. The appendix contains checklists, materials, and forms to help anyone who would like to pursue software inspections.
I believe the book is very readable and should be read by anyone who is interested in learning more about software inspections, including programmers, quality assurance and test personnel, project leaders and managers, inspection champions, Software Engineering Process Groups (SEPGs), and teachers. Readers who are just learning about software inspections, as well as those with inspection experience, will find the book helpful. The book gives an excellent overview of software inspection processes, how to develop a process tailored to your organization or project, and how to describe the business benefits of inspections to all involved. The author is extremely well qualified to write this book, having been significantly involved in the original Fagan inspections and in the leading software process improvement and quality activities in IBM. Radice also led the use of software inspections at Bull, was director of the Software Process Program in the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, and recently was a principal partner in Software Technology Transition, a company that provides training, consulting services, assessment services, and software engineering method solutions.
The book is organized in four main parts. Background and introduction are the topics in Chapters 1 and 2, the software inspection process in Chapters 3 through 8, inspection economics and management in Chapters 9 through 12, and other approaches and the future in Chapters 13...