On the statistical analysis of the number of errors remaining in a software design document after inspection

Sometimes complex software systems fail because of faults introduced in the requirements and design stages of the development process. Reviewing documents related to requirements and design by several reviewers can remove some of these faults but often a few remain undetected until the software is developed. In this paper, we propose a procedure leading to the estimate of the number of faults which are not discovered. The main advantage of our procedure is that we do not need the standard assumption of independence among reviewers.