Assessing the Effectiveness of a Distributed Method for Code Inspection: A Controlled Experiment

We propose a distributed inspection method that tries to minimise the synchronous collaboration among team members to identify defects in software artefacts. The approach consists of identifying conflicts on the potential defects and then resolving them using an asynchronous discussion before performing a traditional synchronous meeting. This approach has been implemented in a Web based tool and assessed through a controlled experiment with master students in Computer Science at the University of Salerno. The tool presented provides automatic merge and conflict highlighting functionalities to support the inspectors during the pre-meeting refinement phase and provides the moderator with information about the inspection progress as a decision support. The tool also supports a synchronous inspection meeting to discuss about unsolved conflicts. However, by analysing the data collected during a controlled experiment we found that this phase can often be skipped due to the fact that asynchronous discussion resolved most of the conflicts.