Review Process Activities

The following sections go into detail on the individual activities mentioned above.

Planning

Define your objectives and choose a type of review

At the planning stage, management—or, more accurately, project management—has to decide which documents (or parts of documents) are to be subject to which type of review. This decision affects the roles that have to be filled the necessary activities and, if required, the use of checklists. You also need to decide which quality characteristics to evaluate. The estimated effort and timespan for each review have to be planned too. The project manager selects a team of appropriately skilled participants and assigns them their roles. The project manager also has to check with the author(s) of the review object(s) that they are in a reviewable state—i.e., they have reached at least a partial conclusion and are as complete as possible.

Formal reviews require predefined entry and exit criteria. If the plan includes entry criteria, you need to check that these have been fulfilled before proceeding with the review.

Different viewpoints increase effectiveness

Checking a document from different viewpoints or having individuals check on specific aspects of a document increases the effectiveness of the review process. These viewpoints and/or aspects have to be defined at the planning stage.

You don’t have to review a document in its entirety. It often makes sense to select the parts that contain high-risk defects, or sample parts that enable you to draw conclusions about the quality of the document as a whole.

If you want to hold a pre-review meeting, you need to decide when and where it takes place.

Initiating a Review

The start (or “kick-off”) of the review process is the point at which the participants are provided with all the necessary physical and electronic materials. This can be a simple written invitation, or a pre-review meeting at which the importance, the purpose, and the objectives of the review are discussed. If participants are not already familiar with the review object’s setting, the kick-off can also be used to briefly describe how the review object fits into its field of application.

Baseline documents

Alongside the work products that are to be reviewed, review participants require other materials. These include any documents that help to decide whether what they are looking at is a deviation, a fault/defect, or a correct statement. These are the basis against which the review object is checked (for example, use cases, design documents, guidelines, and standards). These documents are often referred to as the “baseline”. Additional test criteria (perhaps in the form of checklists) help to structure the procedure. If you are using forms to log your findings, these need to be distributed at the start of the process.

If you are conducting a formal review, you need to check that the entry criteria have been fulfilled. If they are not, the review should be canceled. This saves time that would otherwise be wasted reviewing “immature” work products.

Individual Review Preparation

Studying the review object

A review can only be successful if all participants are well prepared, so each member of the review team has to prepare individually for the review.

The reviewers (or “inspectors”) subject the review object to intense scrutiny using the provided documentation as their baseline. Any potential defects, recommendations, questions, or comments are noted.

Individual preparation can take a number of forms.

Issue Communication and Analysis

Collating your findings

Following individual preparation, the findings are collated and discussed. This can take place at a review meeting or, for example, in a company-internal online forum. The potential deviations and defects found by the team members are discussed and analyzed. You also have to define who is responsible for correction of the identified faults, how to monitor correction progress and determine whether a follow-up review of the fixed document is required or necessary.

The quality characteristics under investigation are defined during planning. Each characteristic is evaluated and the results of the analysis documented.

The review team then has to provide a recommendation regarding acceptance of the review object:

• Accepted without changes or with slight changes
• Revision necessary due to extensive changes
• Not accepted

Side Note: Recommendations for review meetings

If a review meeting takes place, try to observe the following recommendations:

• Limit the duration of the meeting to two hours. If further discussion is necessary, hold a follow-up meeting at the earliest on the following day.
• The moderator (see below) has the right to cancel or suspend a meeting if one or more reviewers are absent or are present but insufficiently prepared
• The object of the discussion is the work product, not its author:
  • Reviewers need to mind their phrasing.
  • The author mustn’t be required to defend himself or his work. However, justification of his decisions can be useful.
• The moderator cannot be a reviewer too
• General questions of style that are not covered by the review criteria are not to be discussed
• The development and discussion of potential solutions is not the review team’s job (see below for exceptions to this rule)
• Every reviewer must be given sufficient opportunity to present her findings
• The reviewers should try to reach and record a consensus
• Findings should not be formulated as fault correction instructions for the author. Suggestions for correction or improvement of the review object can, however, help to improve product quality.
• Individual findings are to be classed⁵ as:
  • Critical (the review object is not suitable for its intended purpose, defect has to be corrected prior to release)
  • Major defect (usability of the object is limited, fault has to be corrected prior to release)
  • Minor defect (slight deviation from plan—for example, grammatical error in print, doesn’t affect usage)
  • Good (free of defects, don’t alter during revision)

Fixing and Reporting

Correcting defects

The final activities in the review process are reporting your findings and correcting any defects or inconsistencies the review has revealed. The minutes of a review meeting often contain all the required information, so that individual reports aren’t necessary for defects that require the review object to be modified. As a rule, the author will rectify any defects revealed by the review.

As well as writing reports, any defects you find can also be communicated directly to the responsible person or team. However, this involves good interpersonal skills, as nobody really likes to talk about their own mistakes.

Formal reviews involve more work

In a formal review, you need to record the current status of a defect or its report. Changing the status of a defect is only possible with the agreement of the responsible reviewer. You also need to check that the specified exit criteria have been fulfilled.

Evaluating the results of a formal review meeting will help you to improve the review process, and to keep the corresponding guidelines and checklists up to date. This requires the gathering and evaluation of appropriate metrics.

The results of a review vary considerably depending on the type of review and the degree of formality involved. The following sections detail different ways to approach the review process, and go on to discuss the roles and responsibilities involved in a formal review.