Supporting inspections with an electronic meeting system

Fagan inspections are a structured review of development documents that consists of individual preparation, a meeting and rework by the author of the document. The meeting is used to log the defects found in preparation and to search for more defects. The effectiveness and efficiency of the meeting is typically low as compared to that of the preparation. The paper describes the use of an EMS to support the logging meeting of a total of 14 electronic inspections in Philips Medical Systems and Baan Company. The results indicate that the electronic logging meeting contributed much more to the overall result of the inspection than was the case in a traditional inspection. The results have implications, both for the software inspections and EMS. The implications for EMS as they are discussed in the paper are: the increased use of meeting metrics, the use of inspections as a guinea pig, and the benefits of fixed format input in an EMS