Some checkers find defects but don't mark them because they think that "somebody else will surely find this, too." They don't recognize their unique contribution and fail to report possibly important findings. This kind of dangerous laziness occurs especially when many checkers have the same material to check possibly even with the same guidelines.

If a checker isn't sure if and what he's found, he might not mark it. The checker might think that "this isn't probably serious enough to mark." Once this happens, the code inspection breaks. The possibly high value of a code inspection starts to diminish with growing fears. The perceived seriousness of a found issue is inversely proportional to the difficulty of reporting it. This means that if the checker has the option of censoring himself, in a difficult phase of the project, when time is of essence, he will. Just when feedback on issues would be at its most valuable, some checkers will be too afraid to report everything they find.

A similar situation occurs if the checker has already found what he considers to be "enough" issues. He will deliberately overlook further items to not appear to be nitpicking and whiny. When the checkers reduce the amount of findings they report on their own, they fail to honor the Plentiful Principle:

The more findings you report, the better.

This often happens when a checker has found large amounts of relatively minor items and thinks that the author might look badly on him should he report all of them.

As a consequence the author is deprived of information. The quality assistance is below par, substandard or even poor. In a malfunctioning code inspection process, the too kind, unsure or scared checkers end up lowering the value the author would otherwise get from the process.

Chapter 2 "Symptoms" deals with general symptoms when an organization doesn't perform any code inspections. It also presents several situations where something goes wrong in code inspections.