Coding for inspections and reviews

Inspections/reviews are a part of agile software development and have been shown to be a cost-effective means of eliminating faults. However, inspections are not a standard practice in many organizations. It is important to identify characteristics of programs which make them 'pleasant to review'. When viewing code, software engineers immediately and subconsciously assign quality attributes to it. In this study, we asked volunteers to view source code and indicate if they felt the program would be pleasant or unpleasant to review. Each of the source files was then processed to calculate various standard software metrics as well as some stylistic characteristics. These results are used to determine typical characteristics of software that is pleasant to review.