The Art of Software Testing, Second Edition

3.1. Inspections and Walkthroughs

The two primary human testing methods are code inspections and walkthroughs. Since the two methods have a lot in common, we will discuss their similarities together here. Their differences are discussed in subsequent sections.

Inspections and walkthroughs involve a team of people reading or visually inspecting a program. With either method, participants must conduct some preparatory work. The climax is a "meeting of the minds," at a participant conference. The objective of the meeting is to find errors but not to find solutions to the errors. That is, to test, not debug.

Code inspections and walkthroughs have been widely used for some time. In our opinion, the reason for their success is related to some of the principles in Chapter 2.

In a walkthrough, a group of developers—with three or four being an optimal number—performs the review. Only one of the participants is the author of the program. Therefore, the majority of program testing is conducted by people other than the author, which follows the testing principle stating that an individual is usually ineffective in testing his or her own program.

An inspection or walkthrough is an improvement over the older desk-checking process (the process of a programmer reading his or her own program before testing it). Inspections and walkthroughs are more effective, again because people other than the program's author are involved in the process.

Another advantage of walkthroughs, resulting in lower ...