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From: bhabeck@hpcuha.cup.hp.com (William Habeck)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Tom Gilb
Message-ID: <44100002@hpcuha.cup.hp.com>
Date: 29 Jan 91 02:48:37 GMT
References: <1991Jan14.151416.374@debet.nhh.no>
Organization: Hewlett Packard, Cupertino
Lines: 58

Alan R. Weiss (alan@tivoli.UUCP) writes:

> OK, I'm going to buy Gilb's books.  Could you provide the "additional
> details" in the interim?  We are on the brink of doing inspections,
> and I need some ammo to load management's guns with.  They're sold
> on it, but ...  this is a small start-up, and I need to cost-justify.
> (Yeah, I can use the hoary old tales of disasters, but I would prefer
> numbers, in dollars and schedule).

I don't have Gilb's books, but I do have some course notes from an 
Inspection Moderation class which include these excerpts from his
"Software Engineering Design":

"Inspection can be expected to make up approximately 15% of your
development budget.  Remember that this replaces all corresponding forms
of walkthroughs and reviews." 

"The net cost of Inspection as viewed on a development project to first 
major delivery is "negative".  That is, any other method will cost you 
more.  The net saving varies from little or nothing (at the beginning
when start-up costs are included) to 35% (when you get over the initial
hump)."

"AT&T Bell Labs started using Fagan Inspections in 1977... They report
their history in an entire issue of AT&T Technical Journal (March/April
1986).  [Results:] 14% productivity increase ... early fault density
data [showed] 10X improvement."

"Inspection can be expected to reduce bugs experienced in testing and
field use by one or two orders of magnitude."

"Inspection can be expected to reduce total maintenance costs of code
which was developed using Inspection by a factor of ten to thirty.
Two-thirds of this reduction will be due to error reduction.  One-third
due to improvement in documentation quality."


Here is a list of reading material for anyone who is interested:

       Gilb: "Principles of Software Engineering Management" (Addison-Wesley)
	     Chapters 12 and 21
       Gilb: "Software Engineering Design"
       AT&T Technical Journal March 1986
       IBM Systems Journal, No. 2 1985
       Weinberg and Freedman: Handbook of Walkthroughs, Inspections and
	     Technical Reviews (Little Brown)
       Juran: Quality Control Handbook (McGraw-Hill)
       Fagan: Advances in Software Inspections (IEEE Trans. on Software
	     Engineering July 1986)
       Radice: Software Engineering Management (1989)
       IMAI: KAIZEN The Key to Japanese Competitive Strategy. 1986 Random House
       Watts S. Humphrey: Managing the Software Process, 1989 Addison-Wesley
       Deming: Out of the Crisis, MIT Press

Hope this helps.

-- Bill Habeck
   bhabeck@hprasor.cup.hp.com