An important part of the inspection process is the use of a checklist to
examine the program for common errors. Unfortunately, some checklists
concentrate more on issues of style than on errors (e.g., ‘‘Are comments
accurate and meaningful?’’ and ‘‘Are if-else code blocks, and do-while
groups aligned?’’), and the error checks are too nebulous to be useful
(such as, ‘‘Does the code meet the design requirements?’’). The checklist in
this section, divided into six categories, was compiled after many years of
study of software errors. It is largely language-independent, meaning that
most of the errors can occur with any programming language. You may
wish to supplement this list with errors peculiar to your programming language
and with errors detected after completing the inspection process