Using Learning Styles of Software Professionals to Improve Their Inspection Performance: An Empirical Study
Abstract
In the IT industry, good requirements specification plays a vital role in software projects success. Researches revealed that early detection of faults in a requirements document saves significant amount of rework. To achieve that, project managers employ inspectors to review and find faults in software requirement specification (SRS) document. Previous researches investigated that factors like educational background and work experience could impact the effectiveness of individual inspectors, with limited success. This research hypothesizes that Learning Style (LS) of individuals can be utilized to improve the performance of individual inspectors and inspection teams. The LS refers to the ways an individual processes or perceives any given information. LS and inspection data of participants were collected to investigate the effectiveness of inspection teams with different LS categories. Results show the teams of participants with most dissimilar LS categories found the largest number of faults compared to the teams with similar LS preferences.