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because inspections are one of the most effective ways to prevent defects and make the
most efficient use of the engineers’ time. There are few tools or techniques that have such
a high potential savings in effort. For each hour spent inspecting documents, the team
saves many hours that would otherwise be lost on correcting problems that would have
been coded incorrectly—preventing the very tasks that engineers find most frustrating.

Luckily, a small number of objections tend to be raised most of the time, and each of these
objections has a straightforward response. In the end, it is usually not hard for a project
manager to show most reasonable people that inspections are worth doing.
The most effective way a project manager can sell inspections to the organization is to show
the savings in terms of time and money. Each inspection yields defects that would have been
much more expensive to fix had they not been found; it should not be hard to give a rough
idea of just how much time and money would have been wasted on those defects.

Another way the project manager can sell inspections is by pointing out the knowledge
transfer benefits. By instituting inspections and code reviews, engineers other than the
author of a work product are cross-trained on it, and can maintain it in the future if the
author is busy with another project or has left the organization. Another way a project
manager can help people accept inspections and understand their benefit is to run the first
inspection meetings using work products created by people who are widely respected in
the organization. Once others see the inspections run well and respectfully, they will be
much more likely to accept the same practice applied to their own work.

When a project manager starts working toward implementing inspections, there are three
objections that come up most often: people feel that inspections take too long, they do not
like their work criticized, and they are protective of the final product. Luckily, it is not
hard to anticipate these objections and give effective responses. (See Chapter 9 for more
advice on making changes in an organization.)

“Inspections take too long.”

Some team members seem to be opposed to anything that seems “bureaucratic.” To them,
inspections are just paper-shuffling meetings that waste their time. They should be writing

code (or design specifications, test plans, requirements, etc.), and don’t have time to waste
just so some manager can check some box somewhere.
To convince someone with this mindset that inspections are necessary, the project man-
ager must show him that every minute spent doing inspections can save many more down
the road. Over the years, software engineering researchers have studied thousands of soft-
ware projects in many different kinds of organizations. They have found again and again
that a defect that takes a few minutes to fix in a vision and scope or a use case document
will require hours, days, or weeks to fix in code or testing.

The project manager should explain that a typical inspection meeting will take less than
two hours. If each person at the meeting finds a single defect, it more than makes up for
the time that he spent reading and correcting the document. When looked at from this
perspective, doing the inspection saves time.
82 CHAPTER FIVE