An Exploratory Study on the Impact of Usage of Screenshot in Software Inspection Recording Activity

This paper describes an exploratory study on theuse of screenshots for recording software inspection activities such as defect reproduction and correction. Although detected defects are usually recorded in writing, using screenshots to record detected defects should ecrease the percentage of irreproducible defects and the time needed to reproduce defects during the defect orrection phase. An experiment was conducted to clarify the efficiency of using screenshots to record detected defects. One practitioner group and two student groups participated in the experiment. The recorder in each group used a prototype support tool for capturing screenshots during the experiment. Each group conducted two trials: one with a general spreadsheet application to support recording, the other with the prototype tool that supportsrecording inspection activities. After the inspection meeting, the recorder was asked to reproduce the recorded defects. The percentage of reproduce defects and time to reproduce defects was measured. The results of the experiment show that use of screenshots increases the percentage of reproduced defects and decreases the time needed to reproduce the defects. The results also indicate that use of the recording tool affected the types of defects.