TY - GEN
T1 - The effect of the number of inspectors on the defect estimates produced by capture-recapture models
AU - Walia, Gursimran Singh
AU - Carver, Jeffrey C.
AU - Nagappan, Nachiappan
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
N2 - Inspections can be made more cost-effective by using capture-recapture methods to estimate post-inspection defects. Previous capture-recapture studies of inspections used relatively small data sets compared with those used in biology and wildlife research (the origin of the models). A common belief is that capture-recapture models underestimate the number of defects but their performance can be improved with data from more inspectors. This increase has not been evaluated in detail. This paper evaluates new estimators from biology not been previously applied to inspections. Using a data from seventy-three inspectors, we analyze the effect of the number of inspectors on the quality of estimates. Contrary to previous findings indicating that Jackknife is the best estimator, our results show that the SC estimators are better suited to software inspections. Our results also provide a detailed analysis of the number of inspectors necessary to obtain estimates within 5% to 20% of the actual.
AB - Inspections can be made more cost-effective by using capture-recapture methods to estimate post-inspection defects. Previous capture-recapture studies of inspections used relatively small data sets compared with those used in biology and wildlife research (the origin of the models). A common belief is that capture-recapture models underestimate the number of defects but their performance can be improved with data from more inspectors. This increase has not been evaluated in detail. This paper evaluates new estimators from biology not been previously applied to inspections. Using a data from seventy-three inspectors, we analyze the effect of the number of inspectors on the quality of estimates. Contrary to previous findings indicating that Jackknife is the best estimator, our results show that the SC estimators are better suited to software inspections. Our results also provide a detailed analysis of the number of inspectors necessary to obtain estimates within 5% to 20% of the actual.
KW - Capture-recapture models
KW - Inspections
KW - Requirements
KW - Validation and verification
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U2 - 10.1145/1368088.1368134
DO - 10.1145/1368088.1368134
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:57349187184
SN - 9781605580791
T3 - Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
SP - 331
EP - 340
BT - ICSE'08
T2 - 30th International Conference on Software Engineering 2008, ICSE'08
Y2 - 10 May 2008 through 18 May 2008
ER -