A method of inspecting at least one feature of a part having a predetermined nominal shape, including: i) loading a contact probe onto a probe mount of a coordinate positioning apparatus which facilitates exchanging of probes thereon and relative movement of the mount and a part in three orthogonal degrees of freedom, the contact probe includes a reference member for engaging the part, and a stylus relative to the reference member and having a tip for contacting the surface to be measured; ii) bringing the reference member and stylus into contact with the part on one side of the feature, and then causing the stylus to traverse collecting measurement data concerning the relative position of tip and the reference member; and iii) extracting feature dimension information from the measurement data, and comparing the extracted dimension information to nominal dimension information for the nominal shape of the feature of the part.