RE: Inspections Was: RE: [AM] ANN: Mashing Deadly Myths

(responding to Paul T)

> OTOH, the ugliness of pair programming is that ten people
> who don't know the answer to a specific problem individually,
> also don't know it collectively. 

One of the advantages of having a team that communicates is
that when somebody needs knowledge or skills they don't
have, they're likely to ask.  Two questions arise; what happens
when they find that nobody knows?  and what happens when
it isn't noticed that somebody needs knowledge or skills they 
don't have?

Experience reduces the incidence of the second problem,
and pairing inexperienced people with experienced ones
will help.  What happens in the case of the first problem will
depend very much on the team, but a team that has a 
culture of asking for help may look outside the team before 
trying to develop the knowledge and skills internally.
(That was Steven Gordon's point, I believe).

There aren't any 'right' answers here.  However, an inspection
of work that has only been seen by its creator is much more
likely to discover problems than would an inspection of work
that has been seen and worked on by many of a team of ten,
where that team is collaborating effectively.  As Scott Preece
points out, a study shows that inspections after a single pairing
leave 15% fewer defects in the code.  One cannot be sure
how many more 'visits' to that code will occur as work
progresses; I tend to use a rule of thumb that each team member
is likely to know 60% of the code, so maybe another 4 of the
team will look at the code during subsequent development.
However, we cannot expect such subsequent visits to give
the code a thorough inspection.  One further consideration to 
take into account is that when pairing, one learns not to add
the defects that your paired partner knows not to add, so
that over time the 15% of the study is likely to grow faster than 
for the single programmer.  (I think that's J.B.'s point?)


Paul Oldfield

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