Roles and Responsibilities within the Review Process

The roles and responsibilities⁹ involved in the review process have already been roughly described in the course of discussing the general principles of reviewing. The following sections go into more detail on roles and their responsibilities within a typical formal review.

Not every role has to be filled by one person, and there are overlaps between roles that justify having one person fill multiple roles (for example, moderator and review leader). However, which roles can be combined depends on the nature of the project and the quality criteria you need to achieve. The individual activities associated with individual roles also vary according to the type of review you are conducting.

Management¹⁰

Management

Management selects which work products and supporting materials are to be included in the review and which type of review is to take place. Management is also responsible for planning reviews and allocating the required resources (people, time, money), and needs to keep an eye on cost-effectiveness. If the results of a review aren’t conclusive, management needs to step in and take controlling decisions.

Side Note

A member of the management team who is also the review object’s author’s boss shouldn’t take part in review meetings, as this involves an implicit evaluation of the author rather than his work, and can limit the freedom of the review discourse. It may also be the case that management doesn’t have appropriate IT skills to take part effectively in technical review meetings. This is, of course, not true for project planning meetings and other management-led tasks, where project and general management skills are of the essence.

Review leader

Review leader

The review leader holds the overall responsibility and is therefore needs to make sure planning, preparation, execution, revision, and any follow-up work all contribute to achieving the review objectives. The review leader decides who participates in a review, as well as when and where it takes place.

Facilitator/Moderator

Facilitator

The job of a facilitator (also often referred to as a moderator) is to ensure the smooth running of review meetings. The success of a review meeting often depends on the moderator’s chairing and diplomatic skills. He or she has to be good at bringing together opposing viewpoints and keeping discussions brief without hurting anyone’s feelings. Also required is a good degree of assertiveness and the ability to detect undertones within the conversation. A facilitator mustn’t have preconceived ideas or a personal opinion of the review object, is responsible for collecting any resulting metrics, and ensures that a report of the meeting is written.

Author

Author

The author in this case is the author of the review object. If there are multiple authors, one of them takes on the role of sole author for the duration of the review meeting. The author ensures that the entry criteria are fulfilled—in other words, that the review object is in a “reviewable” state. Usually, the author is responsible for rectifying any defects found during the review and therefore also for the fulfillment of the exit criteria. The author must never take criticism of the work personally. The review process serves solely to improve the quality of the review object.

Reviewer

Reviewer

Reviewers (sometime also referred to as “inspectors”) are a group of up to five experts who take part in a review following appropriate preparation. Reviewers are usually part of the project team whose work is being reviewed, but can also be other stakeholders who have an interest in the results or people with specialist and/or technical skills.

A reviewer’s task is to identify and describe problematic places in the review object. Having reviewers with different perspectives (testers, developers, end-users, system operators, business analysts, usability experts, and so on) aids the effectiveness of a review, although you heed to make sure that only specialists take part whose views are relevant to the review object.

Having individual reviewers concentrate on specific aspects of the review increases the efficiency of the review process. For example, one reviewer can concentrate on adherence to a particular standard while another checks the program syntax. This distribution of roles takes place at the review planning stage.

Reviewers must differentiate clearly between parts of the review object that pass the review and those that require improvement. Defects must be clearly documented so that they are easy to identify and resolve.

Scribe

Scribe

The scribe (or “recorder”) documents the unresolved issues, open questions, and any other related tasks generated by the review. The documentation has to be brief and precise, and has to include undistorted summaries of all the discussions that took place.

As dedicated tools become more common, the job of review scribe is slowly becoming obsolete. If such tools are in use, every reviewer can record defects, open questions, and decisions directly in the tool interface without the need for separate documentation.

Side Note: Author and scribe

For practical reasons, the author is often also the scribe. The author usually knows exactly what needs documenting in order to perform the changes requested by the reviewers.