bhabeck@hpcuha.cup.hp.com (William Habeck) (01/21/91)
si8_jl17888@debet.nhh.no (Jarle ?) writes: > Who is Tom Gilb ? Tom Gilb is an author, instructor, and consultant who, among other things, teaches a class on software inspections. His address in Norway is Box 102, N-1411 Kolbotn, Norway. (In the U.S., he is at 3065 W. San Ramon, Fresno, CA 93711) In my opinion, he has made major improvements to Fagan inspections and can make a virtually flawless case for why his type of inspection improves software productivity. Additional details provided upon request. -- Bill Habeck, Hewlett-Packard Company bhabeck@hprasor.cup.hp.com
bhabeck@hpcuha.cup.hp.com (William Habeck) (01/29/91)
Alan R. Weiss (alan@tivoli.UUCP) writes: > OK, I'm going to buy Gilb's books. Could you provide the "additional > details" in the interim? We are on the brink of doing inspections, > and I need some ammo to load management's guns with. They're sold > on it, but ... this is a small start-up, and I need to cost-justify. > (Yeah, I can use the hoary old tales of disasters, but I would prefer > numbers, in dollars and schedule). I don't have Gilb's books, but I do have some course notes from an Inspection Moderation class which include these excerpts from his "Software Engineering Design": "Inspection can be expected to make up approximately 15% of your development budget. Remember that this replaces all corresponding forms of walkthroughs and reviews." "The net cost of Inspection as viewed on a development project to first major delivery is "negative". That is, any other method will cost you more. The net saving varies from little or nothing (at the beginning when start-up costs are included) to 35% (when you get over the initial hump)." "AT&T Bell Labs started using Fagan Inspections in 1977... They report their history in an entire issue of AT&T Technical Journal (March/April 1986). [Results:] 14% productivity increase ... early fault density data [showed] 10X improvement." "Inspection can be expected to reduce bugs experienced in testing and field use by one or two orders of magnitude." "Inspection can be expected to reduce total maintenance costs of code which was developed using Inspection by a factor of ten to thirty. Two-thirds of this reduction will be due to error reduction. One-third due to improvement in documentation quality." Here is a list of reading material for anyone who is interested: Gilb: "Principles of Software Engineering Management" (Addison-Wesley) Chapters 12 and 21 Gilb: "Software Engineering Design" AT&T Technical Journal March 1986 IBM Systems Journal, No. 2 1985 Weinberg and Freedman: Handbook of Walkthroughs, Inspections and Technical Reviews (Little Brown) Juran: Quality Control Handbook (McGraw-Hill) Fagan: Advances in Software Inspections (IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering July 1986) Radice: Software Engineering Management (1989) IMAI: KAIZEN The Key to Japanese Competitive Strategy. 1986 Random House Watts S. Humphrey: Managing the Software Process, 1989 Addison-Wesley Deming: Out of the Crisis, MIT Press Hope this helps. -- Bill Habeck bhabeck@hprasor.cup.hp.com