Software peer review

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In software development, peer review is a type of software review in which a work product (document, code, or other) is examined by author's colleagues, in order to evaluate the work product's technical content and quality.

Contents

Purpose

The purpose of a peer review is to provide "a disciplined engineering practice for detecting and correcting defects in software artifacts, and preventing their leakage into field operations" according to the Capability Maturity Model.

When performed as part of each Software development process activity, peer reviews identify problems that can be fixed early in the lifecycle. [1] That is to say, a peer review that identifies a requirements problem during the Requirements analysis activity is cheaper and easier to fix than during the Software architecture or Software testing activities.

The National Software Quality Experiment, [2] evaluating the effectiveness of peer reviews, finds, "a favorable return on investment for software inspections; savings exceeds costs by 4 to 1". To state it another way, it is four times more costly, on average, to identify and fix a software problem later.

Distinction from other types of software review

Peer reviews are distinct from management reviews, which are conducted by management representatives rather than by colleagues, and for management and control purposes rather than for technical evaluation. They are also distinct from software audit reviews, which are conducted by personnel external to the project, to evaluate compliance with specifications, standards, contractual agreements, or other criteria.

Review processes

Peer review processes exist across a spectrum of formality, with relatively unstructured activities such as "buddy checking" towards one end of the spectrum, and more Informal approaches such as walkthroughs, technical peer reviews, and software inspections, at the other. The IEEE defines formal structures, roles, and processes for each of the last three. [3]

Management representatives are typically not involved in the conduct of a peer review except when included because of specific technical expertise or when the work product under review is a management-level document. This is especially true of line managers of other participants in the review.

Processes for formal peer reviews, such as software inspections, define specific roles for each participant, quantify stages with entry/exit criteria, capture software metrics on the peer review process.

"Open source" reviews

In the free / open source community, something like peer review has taken place in the engineering and evaluation of computer software. In this context, the rationale for peer review has its equivalent in Linus's law, often phrased: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", meaning "If there are enough reviewers, all problems are easy to solve." Eric S. Raymond has written influentially about peer review in software development. [4]

Related Research Articles

Acceptance testing Test to determine if the requirements of a specification or contract are met

In engineering and its various subdisciplines, acceptance testing is a test conducted to determine if the requirements of a specification or contract are met. It may involve chemical tests, physical tests, or performance tests.

Software testing is an investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the software product or service under test. Software testing can also provide an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to appreciate and understand the risks of software implementation. Test techniques include the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding failures, and verifying that the software product is fit for use.

Configuration management

Configuration management (CM) is a systems engineering process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. The CM process is widely used by military engineering organizations to manage changes throughout the system lifecycle of complex systems, such as weapon systems, military vehicles, and information systems. Outside the military, the CM process is also used with IT service management as defined by ITIL, and with other domain models in the civil engineering and other industrial engineering segments such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, and buildings.

Inspection in software engineering, refers to peer review of any work product by trained individuals who look for defects using a well defined process. An inspection might also be referred to as a Fagan inspection after Michael Fagan, the creator of a very popular software inspection process.

Inspection Organized examination or formal evaluation exercise

An inspection is, most generally, an organized examination or formal evaluation exercise. In engineering activities inspection involves the measurements, tests, and gauges applied to certain characteristics in regard to an object or activity. The results are usually compared to specified requirements and standards for determining whether the item or activity is in line with these targets, often with a Standard Inspection Procedure in place to ensure consistent checking. Inspections are usually non-destructive.

Code review is a software quality assurance activity in which one or several people check a program mainly by viewing and reading parts of its source code, and they do so after implementation or as an interruption of implementation. At least one of the persons must not be the code's author. The persons performing the checking, excluding the author, are called "reviewers".

Software maintenance in software engineering is the modification of a software product after delivery to correct faults, to improve performance or other attributes.

A Fagan inspection is a process of trying to find defects in documents during various phases of the software development process. It is named after Michael Fagan, who is credited as being the inventor of formal software inspections.

In the context of software engineering, software quality refers to two related but distinct notions:

Software quality assurance (SQA) is a means and practice of monitoring the software engineering processes and methods used in a project to ensure proper quality of the software. It may include ensuring conformance to standards or models, such as ISO/IEC 9126, SPICE or CMMI.

A Software management review is a management study into a project's status and allocation of resources. It is different from both a software engineering peer review, which evaluates the technical quality of software products, and a software audit, which is an externally conducted audit into a project's compliance to specifications, contractual agreements, and other criteria.

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 software engineering, a walkthrough or walk-through is a form of software peer review "in which a designer or programmer leads members of the development team and other interested parties through a software product, and the participants ask questions and make comments about possible errors, violation of development standards, and other problems".

A software technical review is a form of peer review in which "a team of qualified personnel ... examines the suitability of the software product for its intended use and identifies discrepancies from specifications and standards. Technical reviews may also provide recommendations of alternatives and examination of various alternatives".

A software audit review, or software audit, is a type of software review in which one or more auditors who are not members of the software development organization conduct "An independent examination of a software product, software process, or set of software processes to assess compliance with specifications, standards, contractual agreements, or other criteria".

Software security assurance is a process that helps design and implement software that protects the data and resources contained in and controlled by that software. Software is itself a resource and thus must be afforded appropriate security.

Quality engineering is the discipline of engineering concerned with the principles and practice of product and service quality assurance and control. In software development, it is the management, development, operation and maintenance of IT systems and enterprise architectures with a high quality standard.

In engineering, technical peer review is a type of engineering review. Technical peer reviews are a well defined review process for finding and fixing defects, conducted by a team of peers with assigned roles. Technical peer reviews are carried out by peers representing areas of life cycle affected by material being reviewed. Technical peer reviews are held within development phases, between milestone reviews, on completed products or completed portions of products.

Software construction is a software engineering discipline. It is the detailed creation of working meaningful software through a combination of coding, verification, unit testing, integration testing, and debugging. It is linked to all the other software engineering disciplines, most strongly to software design and software testing.

Development testing is a software development process that involves synchronized application of a broad spectrum of defect prevention and detection strategies in order to reduce software development risks, time, and costs.

References

  1. ↑ Kolawa, Adam; Huizinga, Dorota (2007). Automated Defect Prevention: Best Practices in Software Management. Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press. p. 261. ISBN   978-0-470-04212-0.
  2. ↑ National Software Quality Experiment Resources and Results
  3. ↑ IEEE Std. 1028-2008, "IEEE Standard for Software Reviews and Audits"
  4. ↑ Eric S. Raymond. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
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