An empirical study of communication in code inspections

This paper describes an empirical study which addresses the issue of communication among members of a software development organization. In particular, data was collected concerning code inspections in one software development project. The question of interest is whether or not organizational structure (the network of relationships between developers) has an effect on the amount of effort expended on communication between developers. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used, including participant observation, structured interviews, generation of hypotheses from field notes, some simple statistical tests of relationships, and interpretation of results with qualitative anecdotes. The study results show that past and present working relationships between inspection participants affect the amount of meeting time spent in different types of discussion, thus affecting the overall meeting length. Reporting relationships and physical proximity also have an effect, as well as the point in the project that an inspection occurs. All but the last of these factors are organizational structure relationships. The contribution of the study is a set of well-supported hypotheses for further investigation.