An Experimental Evaluation of an Experience-Based Capture-Recapture Method in Software Code Inspections

In order to improve the efficiency of inspections, quantitative data on defect content have to be the basis for decisions in the inspection process. An experience-based capture-recapture method is proposed, which overcomes some problems with the basic pre-requisites of the original method. A C-code inspection experiment is conducted to evaluate the enhanced method and its applicability to software code inspections. It is concluded that the experience-based estimation procedure gives significantly better estimates than the maximum-likelihood method and the estimates are not very sensitive to changes in the inspection data.