Enhancing annotation visibility for software inspection

Annotation of software artifacts is common in software development, and vital for software inspection. People viewing annotated artifacts encounter delocalization: they must understand various parts of an artifact (and their annotations) to understand the part they are viewing. We taxonomize delocalization within software systems into lateral delocalization (different items of the artifact within the same development phase), longitudinal delocalization (related items in different phases), and historical delocalization (successive versions of the same item). We report on a pilot study of code inspection with AnnoSpec, an inspection tool supporting visibility of laterally-delocalized annotations. Our results suggest that addressing delocalization may help people perform inspections more effectively