Overcoming the NAH syndrome for inspection deployment

Despite considerable evidence to show that inspections can help reduce costs and improve quality, inspections are not widely deployed in the software industry. One of the likely reasons for this is the “not applicable here (NAH)” syndrome-developers and managers believe that in their environment, inspections will not provide the benefits seen by other organizations. One of the big challenges for deploying inspections is to overcome this syndrome. We describe two experiments that can be conducted, with little effort, in an organization to obtain data from the organization to build a case for inspections. By conducting one of these experiments, we were able to effectively overcome the NAH syndrome in our organization-many developers and managers are now ready to try inspections in their projects. Though the purpose of the experiment was to overcome the syndrome, the data from the experiment also shows how code inspections compare with unit testing in terms of defect detection capability, and the effect of inspections on the overall cost of development