Generalizing perspective-based inspection to handle object-oriented development artifacts

The value of software inspection for uncovering defects early in the development lifecycle has been well documented. Of the various types of inspection methods published to date, experiments have shown perspective-based inspection to be one of the most effective, because of its enhanced coverage of the defect space. However, inspections in general, and perspective-based inspections in particular, have so far been applied predominantly in the context of conventional structured development methods, and then almost always to textual artifacts, such as requirements documents or code modules. Object-oriented models, particularly of the graphical form, have so far not been adequately addressed by inspection methods. This paper tackles this problem by first discussing the difficulties involved in tailoring the perspective-based inspection approach to object-oriented development methods and, second, by presenting a generalization of the approach which overcomes these limitations. The new version of the approach is illustrated in the context of UML-based object-oriented development.