The first ideas regarding reading techniques were proposed by Harlan
D. Mills in 1972 [LMW79]. He has developed a
reading technique to find defects
in code documents called reading by stepwise abstraction. In code
reading by stepwise abstraction a person identifies prime subprograms
in the software, determines their function and uses them to determine
a function for the entire program. Then it is possible to compare this
derived function to the actual intended one to find defects.
The effectiveness and efficiency of this technique was validated by
Basili & Selby in 1987 [BS87]. They have shown that in a
professional environment code reading
by stepwise abstraction detects more software faults and has a higher
fault detection rate than functional or structural testing.