HW21: Chapter 24

24.6 Explain why program inspections are an effective technique for discovering errors in a program. What types of error are unlikely to be discovered through inspections.

Program inspection is a review technique of visually examining a project to check for errors, clear documentation, and adherence to requirements. This is a simple, yet effective way to get new eyes on the project and perform a high-level analysis of its quality. It’s usually relatively inexpensive, as the reviewers can come from within the company; this allows for more frequent inspections of project quality, which is always a good thing!

Inspections can catch syntax errors, logical errors, and the like. However, without running the code, the obvious subset of errors we are not going to pick up are (yes) run-time errors. In fact, by visually reviewing the code, we can’t even tell if it will run successfully! When the user gets their hands on the project as a product, they will test its limits with what we call edge cases. For example, they might think, “what happens if I click the zoom out button when I can’t zoom out anymore? “. Understanding the project’s reaction to various inputs and edge cases like this requires creating and running a thorough test suite like we are doing for our semester-long project. The main message here: inspections are no replacement for run-time testing!

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• 2020 22