Software Inspection Checklist

Quality Control and Assurance

• The main outputs of quality control are: acceptance decisions, rework, and process adjustments.

Seven Basic Tools of Quality

• Flowcharts: graphic displays of process logic and flow, used to analyze problem occurrence and process improvement.
• Run Charts: display the history and pattern of variation of a process over time.
• Scatter Diagrams: show the relationship between two variables.
• Histograms: bar graphs of a distribution of variables.
• Pareto Charts: histograms that help identify and prioritize problem areas.
• Control Charts: graphic displays of data that illustrate process results over time, used to prevent defects.
• Cause-and-Effect Diagrams: aka fishbone or Ishikawa diagrams, used to find the root cause of a problem.

Inspection Checklists

• Data faults:
  • Are all program variables initialized before their values are used?
  • Have all constants been named?
  • Should the upper bound of arrays be equal to the size of the array or Size -1?
  • Is a delimiter explicitly assigned for character strings?
  • Is there any possibility of buffer overflow?
• Control faults:
  • Is the condition correct for each conditional statement?
  • Is each loop certain to terminate?
  • Are compound statements correctly bracketed?
  • Are all possible cases accounted for in case statements?
  • Is a break included after each case in case statements?
• Input/output faults:
  • Are all input variables used?
  • Are all output variables assigned a value before they are output?
  • Can unexpected inputs cause corruption?
• Interface faults:
  • Do all function and method calls have the correct number of parameters?
  • Do formal and actual parameter types match?
  • Are the parameters in the right order?
• Storage faults management:
  • If components access shared memory, do they have the same model of the shared memory structure?
  • If a linked structure is modified, have all links been correctly reassigned?
  • If dynamic storage is used, has space been allocated correctly?

Quality Assurance

• Quality assurance includes all activities related to satisfying relevant quality standards for a project.
• Another goal of quality assurance is continuous quality improvement.
• Performing Quality Assurance through:
  • Benchmarking
  • Quality audits

Testing

• Many IT professionals think of testing as a stage that comes near the end of IT product development.
• Types of Tests:
  • Unit testing
  • Integration testing
  • System testing
  • User acceptance testing

Testing Limitations

• Watts S.Humphrey defines a software defect as anything that must be changed before delivery of the program.
• Testing does not sufficiently prevent software defects because it does not cover all possible scenarios.

Program Inspections

• These are peer reviews where engineers examine the source of a system to discover anomalies and defects.
• Inspections do not require execution of a system, so they can be used before implementation.