Looking for Ada sample inspection checklists

Looking for Ada sample inspection checklists

[John Goodsen]

Can someone point me to a source of sample checklists to
use as a basis for our checklists to be used in Formal
Inspections of Ada code.  Our goal is to eliminate unit
test in preference for formal inspections.  

Thanks in advance :-)

John Goodsen
goodsenj@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu

Re: Looking for Ada sample inspection checklists

[dog.ee.lbl.gov!network.ucsd.edu!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!umn.edu!atc!email]

goodsenj@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu (John Goodsen) writes:
> 
> Can someone point me to a source of sample checklists to
> use as a basis for our checklists to be used in Formal
> Inspections of Ada code.  Our goal is to eliminate unit
> test in preference for formal inspections.  
> 
> Thanks in advance :-)
> 
> John Goodsen
> goodsenj@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu

We have formal code inspection guidelines, but we do not have a
checklist. In my experience, our Ada code reviews have found the 
more obvious errors and were very helpful. We used Ada as the PDL for
detailed design, so there are at least two inspections of the code 
(the Ada PDL for interfaces became Ada code). But I would never want
to eliminate unit testing, because it tends to find synchronization
problems, timing errors, and error recovery problems not discovered
during Detailed Design or during code inspections. I am not sure human
inspectors can, via a checklist, discover these problems. I want to 
discover errors as soon as possible, and it is better to find them
during unit testing than during CSC integration.  For the record,
our CSU (unit) could be a library level procedure, library package, 
or occasionally a group of library level packages.

We did/are developing some assembly language code that also undergoes
inspection. In assembly language code reviews the writer goes through
any explains every line of the assembly code. The reviewers make sure
the addressing modes, runtime assumptions, parameter passing, etc. is
correct. The reviewers often encourage the writer to place more
information of expected runtime conditions and the writer's assumptions
in the prologues. There are almost alway more errors found in the 
assembly code.

Robert Parkhill
Paramax, A Unisys company