Investigating the active guidance factor in reading techniques for defect detection

Inspections are an established quality assurance technique. In order to optimize the inspection performance, different reading techniques, such as checklist-based reading and scenario-based reading have been proposed. Various experiments have been conducted to evaluate which of these techniques produces better inspection results (i.e., which finds more defects with less effort). However, results of these empirical investigations are not conclusive yet. Thus, the success factors of the different reading approaches need to be further analyzed. In this paper, we report on a preliminary empirical study that examined the influence of the active guidance factor (provided by scenario-based approaches) when inspecting requirements specification documents. First results show that active guidance is accepted with favor by inspectors and suggest that it is better suited for larger and more complex documents.