Mississippi State University
Project managers use inspection data as input to capture-recapture models that will estimate the total number of faults present in a software artifact as a guide to the level of quality. The capture-recapture models use the number of faults found during an inspection and the overlap of faults among inspectors to calculate the estimate. A common belief is that capture recapture models underestimate the number of defects but their performance can be improved by including more data as input (larger number of inspectors and larger number of defects). Our earlier research investigated the minimum number of inspectors required for achieving satisfactory capture-recapture estimates. This paper investigates the minimum number of faults that has to be present in an artifact before capture-recapture method can be used.