A Replicate Empirical Comparison between Pair Development and Software Development with Inspection

In 2005, we studied the development effort and effect of quality comparisons between software development with Fagan's inspection and pair development. Three experiments were conducted in Thailand: two classroom experiments and one industry experiment. We found that in the classroom experiments, the pair development group had less average development effort than the inspection group with the same or higher level of quality. The industry experiment's result showed pair development to have a bit more effort but about 40% fewer major defects. However, since this set of experiments was conducted in Thailand, the results may be different if we conducted the experiment in other countries due to the impact of cultural differences. To investigate this we conducted another experiment with computer science graduate students at USC in Fall 2006. Unfortunately, the majority of the graduate students who participated in the experiment were from India, a country in which the culture is not much different from Thailand. As a result, we cannot compare the impact of cultural differences in this paper. However, the results showed that the experiment can be replicated in other countries where the cultures are similar.