1. History of Software Inspections
Micheal Fagan
M. Broy, E. Denert (Eds.): Software Pioneers
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2002

2. History of Software Inspections - 1
In 1971, at IBM, Micheal Fagan moves from hardware engineering to software engineering,
Development was chaotic, and, what was worse, no one seemed to have a way to get it under control.
It was obvious, even without measurement, that reworking defects was a very significant component (30% to 80%) of the software development effort
He found himself in a software development world largely unmanageable with a high potential for failure.
He decided to lead the development of a method, similar to a method used in hardware engineering to find and fix defects in the product and the process.
«I was ridiculed, counseled and otherwise told to stop the nonsense and get on with the job of managing projects the way everyone else was doing it.»
(Fagan 2002)

3. History of Software Inspections - 2
Benefits of inspections listed by Fagan:
Reduction in user-reported defects;
Increased customer satisfaction;
Increased development productivity, which materializes in shipping more function in a given time or reduction in time to delivery;
Improvement in meeting committed schedules;
Rapid cross-training of developers and maintainers on new products;
Continuous process improvement through removal of systemic defects
Authors rapidly learned to avoid creating defects through participating in inspections that find defects in their own work products and in the work products of others;
Team building; and
Inspection have, in some cases, eliminated the need to implement unit test code.
«Even 40 years after its creation, it [inspection] is often not well understood and more often, poorly executed»
Adapted from (Fagan 2002)