IBIS: Internet Based Inspection System

Problem

Peer reviews are a software engineering "best practice" for detecting and correcting defects in software artifacts.

Software inspections are a disciplined form of peer reviews, which were developed in the original form by Michael Fagan at IBM and then adopted in many variants by organizations such as NASA, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, and Lucent Technologies.

Software inspections rigorously define:

• a phased process to follow
• roles performed by peers during review
• a reading toolset to guide the review activity
• forms and report templates to collect product and process data

Because defects are detected early in the software life cycle, performing software inspections reduce rework activities, thus saving time and costs.

Software inspection costs include:

• training costs for new reviewers and moderators
• effort for individual reviewers' preparation and inspection meetings
• effort for filling forms and preparing reports, entering data in the measurement database, and analyze data

Inspection costs can be reduced through an automated inspection infrastructure. However, the current trend towards spreading organizations over the globe, poses a new problem: how to manage geographically distributed inspection teams.

Internet ubiquity offers the opportunity to reengineer the inspection process and provide an automated support for virtual inspection teams.

Goal

To design and implement a software inspection support system which uses the main Internet application-level services as infrastructure for geographically distributed inspection teams.

Keywords

IBIS, peer reviews, software inspections, Internet-based applications, web technology.

Participants

Filippo Lanubile (Project Leader)
Teresa Mallardo (Post-doc at University of Bari)
CS final-year students at University of Bari

Publications

• D. Damian, F. Lanubile, and T. Mallardo, "The Role of Asynchronous Discussions in Increasing the Effectiveness of Remote Synchronous Requirements Negotiations", Proc. of the International Conference on Software Engineering - Emerging Results Session (ICSE 2006), Shanghai, China, ACM Press, New York, May 2006, pp. 917-920.
• D. Damian, F. Lanubile, and T. Mallardo, "An Empirical Study of the Impact of Asynchronous Discussions on Remote Synchronous Requirements Meetings", Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Vol. 3922, March 2006, pp. 155 - 169.
• D. Damian, F. Lanubile, and T. Mallardo, "Investigating IBIS in a Distributed Educational Environment: the Design of a Case Study", Proc. of the International Workshop on Distributed Software Development (DISD 2005), Paris, France, Austrian Computer Society, August 2005.
• F. Lanubile, and T. Mallardo, "A Preliminary Study on Asynchronous Discussions for Distributed Software Inspections", Proc. of the ASE Workshop on Cooperative Support for Distributed Software Engineering Processes (CSSE 2004), Linz, Austria, Austrian Computer Society, September 2004.
• F. Lanubile, T. Mallardo, and F. Calefato, "Tool Support for Geographically Dispersed Inspection Teams", Software Process: Improvement and Practice, vol.8, no.4, Wiley InterScience, October/December 2003, pp. 217-231.
• F. Lanubile, and T. Mallardo, "Tool Support for Distributed Inspection", Proc. of the 26th Annual International Computer Software & Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2002), Oxford, England, IEEE Computer Society, August 2002, pp. 1071-1076.
• F. Lanubile, and T. Mallardo, "Preliminary Evaluation of Tool-based Support for Distributed Inspection", Proc. of the ICSE Workshop on Global Software Development (GSD 2002), Orlando, FL, USA, May 2002.
• F. Lanubile, T. Mallardo, F. Calefato, C. Denger, and M. Ciolkowski, "Assessing the Impact of Active Guidance for Defect Detection: A Replicated Experiment", Proc. of the 10th International Software Metrics Symposium (METRICS 2004), Chicago, Illinois, USA, IEEE Computer Society, September 2004, pp. 269-279.
• C. Denger, M. Ciolkowski, and F. Lanubile, "Investigating the Active Guidance Factor in Reading Techniques for Defect Detection", Proc. of the 3rd International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE 2004), Redondo Beach CA, USA, IEEE Computer Society, August 2004, pp. 219-228.
• C. Denger, M. Ciolkowski, and F. Lanubile, "Does Active Guidance Improve Software Inspections? A Preliminary Empirical Study", Proc. of the IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering (SE 2004), Innsbruck, Austria, ACTA Press, February 2004.
• F. Lanubile, and T. Mallardo, "An Empirical Study of Web-Based Inspection Meetings", Proc. of the 2nd International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE 2003), Roman Castles, Rome, Italy, IEEE Computer Society, September/October 2003, pp. 244-251.

Approach

Software inspection can be distributed across multiple sites on condition that:

• It is supported by some Internet-mediated environment (basic requirements)
  • Tool support as a web application with email-based event notification
  • Inspection data stored and exchanged as XML documents
• It is reorganized to reduce synchronization and coordination (advanced requirements)
  • Reengineered inspection process

IBIS Home Page

IBIS ver. 3.x is available at: http://ibis.di.uniba.it/

Other Information

IBIS (and all files provided) is available under the IBIS License which is based on the MIT licence.
The version 1.x is implemented in MS ASP and is downloadable HERE.
The versions 3.x and 2.x are implemented using .NET platform, developed on SourceForge at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/ibis/, and downloadable HERE.