  To reinforce the quality of code delivery, especially to improve future
coding quality, one global Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
enterprise has institutionalized a retrospective style inspection (namely
retro-inspection), which is similar to Fagan inspection but differs in terms of
stage, participants, etc. This paper reports an industrial case study that aims
to investigate the experiences and lessons from this software practice. To this
end, we collected and analyzed various empirical evidence for data
triangulation. The results reflect that retro-inspection distinguishes itself
from peer code review by identifying more complicated and underlying defects,
providing more indicative and suggestive comments. Many experienced inspectors
indicate defects together with their rationale behind and offer suggestions for
correction and prevention. As a result, retro-inspection can benefit not only
quality assurance (like Fagan inspection), but also internal audit,
inter-division communication, and competence promotion. On the other side, we
identify several lessons of retro-inspection at this stage, e.g., developers'
acceptance and organizers' predicament, for next-step improvement of this
practice. To be specific, some recommendations are discussed for
retro-inspection, e.g., more adequate preparation and more careful publicity.
This study concludes that most of the expected benefits of retro-inspection can
be empirically confirmed in this enterprise and its value on the progress to
continuous maturity can be recognized organization-wide. The experiences on
executing this altered practice in a large enterprise provide reference value
on code quality assurance to other software organizations.
