Software Engineering for Students A Programming Approach

286 Chapter 20 ■ Groups
Of course walkthroughs do mean that the individual has to be relaxed about presenting
their work to colleagues.
20.4 ● Inspections
These are similar to structured walkthroughs – a group of people meet to review a piece
of work. But they are different from walkthroughs in several respects. Checklists are used
to ensure that no relevant considerations are ignored. Errors that are discovered are classified
according to type and carefully recorded on forms. Statistics on errors are computed,
for example in terms of errors per 1,000 lines of code. Thus inspections are not
just well organized, they are completely formal. In addition management is informed of
the results of inspections, though usually they do not attend the meeting. Thus inspections
are potentially more threatening to the programmer than walkthroughs.
There are other, minor, differences between inspections and walkthroughs.
Normally there are only four members in an inspection team:
■ the moderator, who co-ordinates activities
■ the person who designed the program component being inspected
■ the programmer
■ the tester – a person who acts as someone who will be responsible for testing the
component.
The essence of inspections is that the study of products is carried out under close
management supervision. Thus inspections are overtly a mechanism for increased control
over programmers’ work, similar to the way that quality control is carried out on a
factory floor. Some programmers might feel threatened in this situation and become
defensive, perhaps trying to hide their mistakes. Perhaps this makes the discovery of
errors more painful, and programming a less enjoyable activity.
From an organizational point of view, keeping records of faults discovered during
inspections provides information to predict the quality of the software being written.
Also, by highlighting common mistakes it can be used to improve programmers selfawareness
and thereby improve their skills.
20.5 ● Pair programming
Here two people sit down together, looking at the same computer screen, and carry out
programming, including writing and applying tests.
The people have different roles. One has the use of the keyboard and mouse. They
are thinking and working on the implementation of the current piece of code (usually
a particular method). They are thinking on a small scale and locally. The other person
does two things:
■ observe, looking for errors
■ think more strategically.