A Software Support Tool for Teaching Software Inspection

Abstract

The objective of inspection process is to reduce the cost by finding and removing defects earlier. In recent years, there have been a number of attempts to further increase inspection efficiency by the introduction of tool support, resulting in a number of prototype systems. Moreover, many software engineers suffer from lack of background knowledge and experience on software inspections and its techniques. The purpose of the study is to investigate the possible ways to educate Software engineers with high efficiency and to develop a teaching tool with appropriate features. So, we offered a teaching framework to make software engineering students have a deep understanding on software inspection and to improve their practical abilities. The framework consists of three parts: general guidelines, specific guidelines and learning activity. In addition, there are two parts of general guidelines: Software inspection concept and Software inspection technique. Specific guidelines include Software inspection process and technique processing of Software inspection. The third layer includes conceptual samples, collaboration in practice, work sample and assessment for improving practical skills and abilities. Based on the teaching framework, a software support is designed and developed by interactive feature such as combining text, sound, graphic, images and animation. The tool is evaluated using software engineering students in University of Malaya to shows its usefulness and effectiveness. We found that the tool is useful and effectiveness to be used as a teaching tool.