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“sweet spot” where you are catching enough defects, encouraging sufficient collaboration,
transferring enough knowledge, and, most importantly, giving the proper guidance to your
vendor team.
The most direct route for identifying and fixing defects is to have everyone on the inspec-
tion team meet in person. However, there are times (such as when an outsourced vendor
team is in another country) when this is simply unfeasible. Luckily, there is a highly suc-
cessful precedent in the software industry of collaboration without face-to-face meetings.
Some of the most successful open source projects (such as Linux, Apache, Mozilla, Perl,
PostgreSQL, and Subversion) are excellent examples of distributed teams who review each
others’ work without having face-to-face meetings. Project teams for most large, success-
ful open source projects accomplish this through discussion groups, mailing lists, and
other collaboration tools. They also browse log messages from the version control system,
and use an automated project monitoring system (see Chapter 7) to keep the team up-to-
date on the health of the code. Using these tools, project team members can collaborate on
resolving the defects without having to meet face-to-face, but also without requiring enor-
mous effort from the moderator. People collaborating in this way have produced some of
the most reliable, defect-free software available at the time of this writing. You can take
advantage of this in your own software projects.

Table 11-1 shows an inspection process that has been modified to be used with an out-
sourced project. This script differs from the one in Chapter 5 in that it does not require an
inspection meeting. Instead, the inspectors prepare comments and send them back to the
moderator, who consolidates them and works with individual inspectors to identify solu-
tions that they all agree on. This requires much more time than a single inspection meet-
ing because instead of having one single discussion about each defect, the moderator must
have many different discussions with individual inspectors regarding each defect. It also
requires that the selected moderator have extensive familiarity and expertise with the
work product being inspected. This may mean that the project manager must serve as the
moderator, but that’s not always the case.

TABLE 11-1. Inspection script for multiple organizations

Name Inspection script for use in multiple organizations

Purpose To run a moderated inspection (without a meeting) for a team with members in different
organizations
Summary In an inspection, a moderator leads a team of reviewers in reviewing a work product and fix-
ing any defects that are found. The inspectors are from multiple organizations, so they never
meet face to face.
Work Products Input
Work product being inspected
Output
Inspection log
Entry Criteria A moderator must be selected, as well as team of 3 to 10 people. A work product must be
selected, and each team member has read it individually and identified all wording that must
be changed or clarified before he or she will approve the work product. A unique version
number has been assigned to the work product.

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