Inspection of OO Software with Incomplete Documentation Using A Document Driven Approach

Abstract

<p>Critical software requires formal and rigorous inspection to achieve the required quality, and good documentation provides a solid basis for inspection. The Document Driven Inspection approach takes advantage of precise and complete documentation to serve as a mathematically rigorous and effective technique to review software in a disciplined way. However, it is often the case that precise and complete documents are not available to the inspectors. In these cases, the Document Driven Inspection approach is still useful as illustrated by our case study. As far as we are aware, this is the first application of this approach to an object-oriented critical software system. In this thesis, we investigate several state-of-the-art techniques in software inspection, and also some new techniques that focus on inspection of object-oriented design and code. The Document Driven Inspection approach proposed by Parnas is introduced and further analyzed as applied to an object-oriented design, especially those with incomplete documentation. We illustrate the application of this approach as applied to an object-oriented case study, by producing the complete and rigorous documents that can then act as a basis for further inspection. These documents also illustrate how to document an object-oriented design using tabular expressions.</p>