Even the most successful inspections can fail if team members aren't vigilant. A large financial institution has agreed to allow their story to be told (anonymously) for the purpose of illustrating how a program that was a classic success could fall into disuse. Specifically, you'll see how the company built up a very successful inspection program, and was achieving significant benefits, until four years later when inspections were no longer being done. How did this happen? Is it unique? What did they do right, and in the end what went wrong? This presentation delivers the lessons learned from this story, so you can avoid making the same mistakes.

PREfix provides a source code simulation tool that is able to perform automatic review for a wide range of programming defects that lead to program crashes. Defects reported by PREfix include de-referencing NULL pointers, using uninitialized memory, leaking memory or resources, or using illegal values. Here is an analysis of the product.

Do testers really belong in early reviews? For Michael Dedolph, the answer is yes! For that matter, he thinks more installers should be involved as well. Why? Testers and installers are usually involved in the "end game," so they add value by bringing that very different point of view to the review process.

Thousands of hours are spent testing, but most software professionals find that traditional testing simply isn't enough to ensure code quality. This presentation gives software professionals a complementary approach: software inspection. Learn how software inspection differs from traditional testing, and gain an understanding of principal inspection techniques.