Application of the Kusumoto Cost-Metric to Evaluate the Cost-Effectiveness of Software Inspections

Abstract

Inspection and testing are two widely recommended techniques for software quality improvement with a common goal of defect detection and removal in software products. While testing cannot be conducted until software is implemented, inspections can be applied in early stages of software development. In this way inspection enables saving of testing cost and time. To manage the quality of their software, project managers need objective information to make a trade-off between the testing costs saved by performing inspections against the testing cost that would otherwise be spent if no inspections were performed. Project managers also need to decide on the number of inspectors that would make it a cost-effective inspection process. To accomplish these research goals, we have analyzed the cost invested in the inspection process against the cost saved from the inspection process by applying the Kusumoto cost-metrics on an inspection data set with varying number of inspection team size.