Software review

A software review is "A process or meeting during which a software product is examined by a project personnel, managers, users, customers, user representatives, or other interested parties for comment or approval".

In this context, the term "software product" means "any technical document or partial document, produced as a deliverable of a software development activity", and may include documents such as contracts, project plans and budgets, requirements documents, specifications, designs, source code, user documentation, support and maintenance documentation, test plans, test specifications, standards, and any other type of specialist work product.

Software reviews may be divided into three categories:

"Formality" identifies the degree to which an activity is governed by agreed (written) rules. Software review processes exist across a spectrum of formality, with relatively unstructured activities such as "buddy checking" towards one end of the spectrum, and more formal approaches such as walkthroughs, technical reviews, and software inspections, at the other. IEEE Std. 1028-1997 defines formal structures, roles, and processes for each of the last three ("formal peer reviews"), together with software audits.

Research studies tend to support the conclusion that formal reviews greatly outperform informal reviews in cost-effectiveness. Informal reviews may often be unnecessarily expensive (because of time-wasting through lack of focus), and frequently provide a sense of security which is quite unjustified by the relatively small number of real defects found and repaired.

IEEE Std 1028 defines a common set of activities for "formal" reviews (with some variations, especially for software audit). The sequence of activities is largely based on the software inspection process originally developed at IBM by Michael Fagan. Differing types of review may apply this structure with varying degrees of rigour, but all activities are mandatory for inspection:

The most obvious value of software reviews (especially formal reviews) is that they can identify issues earlier and more cheaply than they would be identified by testing or by field use (the defect detection process). The cost to find and fix a defect by a well-conducted review may be one or two orders of magnitude less than when the same defect is found by test execution or in the field.

A second, but ultimately more important, value of software reviews is that they can be used to train technical authors in the development of extremely low-defect documents, and also to identify and remove process inadequacies that encourage defects (the defect prevention process).

...
Wikipedia