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Cited by 257

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

A controlled experiment in program testing and code walkthroughs/inspections

Open access
Myers, Glenford J.·1978·Communications of the ACM

Abstract

This paper describes an experiment in program testing, employing 59 highly experienced data processing professionals using seven methods to test a small PL/I program. The results show that the popular code walkthrough/inspection method was as effective as other computer-based methods in finding errors and that the most effective methods (in terms of errors found and cost) employed pairs of subjects who tested the program independently and then pooled their findings. The study also shows that there is a tremendous amount of variability among subjects and that the ability to detect certain types of errors varies from method to method.

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Metadata

Authors
Myers, G. J.
Venue
Communications of the ACM
Published
1978-09
Volume
21
Issue
9
Pages
760-768
ISSN
  • 0001-0782 (ISSN-L)
  • 1557-7317
OpenAlex
W2161101035
Cited by
257
References
7
FWCI
23.96
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A controlled experiment in program testing and code walkthroughs/inspections. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/359588.359602
The paper
Myers, G. J. (1978). A controlled experiment in program testing and code walkthroughs/inspections. Communications of the ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/359588.359602

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.