I'm doing my master thesis about software inspections and I want to call the process in the same way in every place. So, I'm asking if I should call inspections with small i or Inspection with capital I because is the name of a process.
I'm tending to use Inspection with capital I, what do you think about it?
Note 1: when i'm talking about software inspection I'm referring to the formal review process, known as Fagan Inspection.
Note 2: the IEEE standard about Software Reviews and Audits (1028) name it inspection, with small i, but Tom Gilb and Dorothy Graham in the preface of "Software Inspection" name it with capital I.
Hi
I would suggest spelling 'Inspection' it with a capital 'I' but then 'Software' must also be spelt with a capital 'S' for consistency. Then you can you the acronym SI for the sake of brevity.
Dear Darion,
Nowadays, style guides often recommend using as few capitals as possible, see, for example, the Economist's Style Guide: http://www.economist.com/style-guide/capitals.
As to technical terms like 'software inspection': here it seems to me that using lower case is best, because 'software inspection' does not refer to a unique entity, and it appears to me that it is not used as a proper name in the context of your thesis. Just to compare, it may help to know that style guides recommend to use lower case in 'object-oriented programming' (acronym OOP), which refers to a general programming paradigm, but upper case in 'Prolog', which can be used as proper name for a specific programming language.
You can still use the upper case acronym SI for software inspection, if you want: in general, lower case terms often go together with upper case acronyms.
For an interesting discussion on capitals versus lower case for technical terms in a Wikipedia context, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29/Archive_89#When_are_names_for_technical_methods_and_systems_proper_names_and_when_are_they_not.3F
Best wishes,
Rineke Verbrugge
Otto, I'm completely agree with SI acronym.
Rineke, very interesting answer. You are right about the use of capitals, but when you say " 'software inspection' does not refer to a unique entity" indeed software inspection it's the name of a technique (it's not a general inspection).
I think that it's a interesting discussion. I'll wait a bit more to make a decision about it because by now we are in a draw!
Thanks to both of you!
Dear Darío,
When referring to the specific method, you could also choose to use the term 'Fagan Inspection' (capitals), which appears to be accepted as a proper name.
Note that the authors of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagan_inspection use lower case for 'software inspection'. Sometimes they use 'Fagan Inspection', while other times referring to 'Fagan inspection'.
Good luck with your decision and with your master's thesis!
Best wishes,
Rineke Verbrugge
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Linguistics
- Composition Studies
- Writing