Investigating the influence of inspector learning styles on design inspections: Findings of a quasi-experiment. Carneiro, G., Laigner, R., Kalinowski, M., Winkler, D., & Biffl, S. In CIbSE 2017 - XX Ibero-American Conference on Software Engineering, pages 222-235, 2017.
Investigating the influence of inspector learning styles on design inspections: Findings of a quasi-experiment [pdf]Author version  abstract   bibtex   1 download  
Software inspections are an efficient mean to improve quality. Learning Styles (LS) have been used to detect an individual's preferences to acquire and process information according to different dimensions. For requirements inspections, inspection teams with different LSs showed more effective at detecting defects than teams with similar LS. The goal of this paper is to investigate the influence of inspector's LS on the effectiveness and efficiency of design inspections. We conducted a quasi-experiment using a subset of a real requirements document and corresponding design diagrams with seeded defects, characterizing each of the participants according to their LSs. We also implemented a script to combine inspectors into nominal inspection teams. We observed that, for design inspections, teams with similar LSs were more effective and efficient than teams with dissimilar LSs. Design inspections seem to be affected more by other factors, such as defect detection techniques, than from selecting inspectors based on their learning styles. However, replications are needed to reinforce our results.

Downloads: 1