Defect types and software inspection techniques: A systematic mapping study

Abstract

Software inspection has been used to guarantee and control the quality of products by detecting defects, which can be spread out throughout the entire software life cycle. Therefore, the main premise is to identify and reduce the number of defect types in software artifacts during inspections. This work focuses on providing an up to dated overview of existing defects in the context of software inspection techniques. A systematic mapping was carried out, from which 2096 primary studies were retrieved and 32 were final selected. From the analysis, classification and aggregation of the retrieved studies, important different defect types were identified. Most studies encompass defect types by means of experiments and proposed techniques and approaches. Thus, as a main result, the identification of several different studies with distinct proposals concerned on defect types is evident. Although researchers have conducted studies over time, a general pattern on the detection of defects could not be established. Therefore, the scenario in which this study was carried out provides researchers with the capability of conducting further research in a motivating and challenging research topic, as well as practitioners with the adoption of empirically evaluated inspection techniques and respective defect types.