Here are a small section about reviews, just a few notes taken from the book “software testing foundations”.
Review is a common generic term for all the different human statistics analysis techniques, as well as te term for a document examination technique.
All documents can be subject to a review or inspection. Reviews are also called peer reviews, since they are done by peers. This is to increase the quality of the review, since one always make a small review of ones own documents.
Ideally, the review should be done as soon as possible after a document is completed, to find anomalies as soon as possible.
Good and bad
The positive effects
- Cheaper defect elimination.
- Shortened development time.
- If defects are recognized and corrected early, costs and time needed for execution of dynamic tests decrease.
- Because of the smaller number of defects, cost reduction can be expected during the whole lifecycle of the product.
- Reduced failure rate during operation of the system.
- Mutual learning, as a side effect of using a team of people for the examinations.
- The necessity to formulate a clear document lets the author find forgotten issues.
- The responsibility for the quality of the examined object are given to the whole team, and they will therefore gain a common understanding of it.
The negative effects
- In a badly moderated review session, the author may feel the same as the other team-members might feel when their result fail: He himself and not the document are subject to critical scrutiny, thus destroying the motivation.
Economics
The cost caused by the reviews are estimated to be 10-15% of the development budget. The savings are estimated to be about 14-25%, leaving an overall gain of 1-10%. This is before the inherited consequences of faults are considered. If reviews are systematically used and efficiently run, more than 70% of the defects in a document can be found and repaired before they are unknowingly inherited by the next work steps.
Planning
During overall planing, managementt must decide which documents in the software development process are subject to which review technique. The estimated efforts must be included in the project plans.
A review is, in most cases, more successful when the examined document is read from differend viewpoints, or if every person only checks particular aspects.
Overview
The purpost of the overview(or kickoff) is to share information about the document to be reviewed, share info about the significance and about the obective of the planned review. If the involved members are unfamiliar with the domain or application are of the review object, then there can be a short introduction about the material, as well as a description of how it fits.
