Sommerville-Software-Engineering-10ed

24.3 ■ Reviews and inspections 711
Planning
Group
preparation
Individual
preparation
Review
meeting
Error
correction
Improvement
Follow-up
checks
Pre-review activities Post-review activities
Figure 24.7 The
software review
process
and user manuals may all be reviewed. The review should check the consistency and
completeness of the documents or code under review and, if standards have been
defined, make sure that these quality standards have been followed.
Reviews are not just about checking conformance to standards. They are also
used to help discover problems and omissions in the software or project documentation.
The conclusions of the review should be formally recorded as part of the quality
management process. If problems have been discovered, the reviewers’ comments
should be passed to the author of the software or whoever is responsible for correcting
errors or omissions.
The purpose of reviews and inspections is to improve software quality, not to assess
the performance of people in the development team. Reviewing is a public process of
error detection, compared with the more private component-testing process. Inevitably,
mistakes that are made by individuals are revealed to the whole programming team. To
ensure that all developers engage constructively with the review process, project managers
have to be sensitive to individual concerns. They must develop a working culture
that provides support without blame when errors are discovered.
Quality reviews are not management progress reviews, although information about
the software quality may be used in making management decisions. Progress reviews
compare the actual progress in a software project against the planned progress. Their
prime concern is whether or not the project will deliver useful software on time and
on budget. Progress reviews take external factors into account, and changed circumstances
may mean that software under development is no longer required or has to be
radically changed. Projects that have developed high-quality software may have to be
canceled because of changes to the business or its operating environment.
24.3.1 The review process
Although there are many variations in the details of reviews, review processes
(Figure 24.7) are structured into three phases:
1. Pre-review activities These are preparatory activities that are essential for the
review to be effective. Typically, pre-review activities are concerned with
review planning and review preparation. Review planning involves setting up
a review team, arranging a time and place for the review, and distributing
the documents to be reviewed. During review preparation, the team may meet to
get an overview of the software to be reviewed. Individual review team members
read and understand the software or documents and relevant standards.