An Industrial Experience Report on Retro-inspection

TL;DR

This paper presents an industrial case study of retro-inspection, a retrospective code review process, highlighting its benefits in defect detection, quality assurance, and organizational communication, along with lessons learned for improvement.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the effectiveness and challenges of retro-inspection in a large enterprise, offering practical recommendations for its implementation.

Findings

Retro-inspection detects more complex defects than peer reviews.

Inspectors provide detailed rationale and suggestions for correction.

Most expected benefits of retro-inspection are empirically confirmed.

Abstract

To reinforce the quality of code delivery, especially to improve future coding quality, one global Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enterprise has institutionalized a retrospective style inspection (namely retro-inspection), which is similar to Fagan inspection but differs in terms of stage, participants, etc. This paper reports an industrial case study that aims to investigate the experiences and lessons from this software practice. To this end, we collected and analyzed various empirical evidence for data triangulation. The results reflect that retro-inspection distinguishes itself from peer code review by identifying more complicated and underlying defects, providing more indicative and suggestive comments. Many experienced inspectors indicate defects together with their rationale behind and offer suggestions for correction and prevention. As a result, retro-inspection can benefit not only quality assurance (like Fagan inspection), but also internal audit, inter-division communication, and competence promotion. On the other side, we identify several lessons of retro-inspection at this stage, e.g., developers' acceptance and organizers' predicament, for next-step improvement of this practice. To be specific, some recommendations are discussed for retro-inspection, e.g., more adequate preparation and more careful publicity. This study concludes that most of the expected benefits of retro-inspection can be empirically confirmed in this enterprise and its value on the progress to continuous maturity can be recognized organization-wide. The experiences on executing this altered practice in a large enterprise provide reference value on code quality assurance to other software organizations.