Posted Nov 30,2011 by 
The idea for software reviews was initially proposed by Gerry Weinberg in 1970s, in his book the Psychology of computer programming. A review is a process or meeting during which a work product or a set of work products is presented to project personnel, managers, users, customers, or other interested parties for comment or approval.
It is also known as a technical assessment of a work product created during the software engineering process. It is essentially a meeting conducted by technical people for technical people to evaluate a work product. Reviews are educational and they also help to catch errors which developers may miss more easily than anyone else
The primary function is to use the skill of a group of people to identify:
- Needed improvements
- Certify correctness
- Encourage uniformity
- Enforce subjective rules
The secondary function of reviews is to:
- Communication
- Milestone
- Visibility to management
Types of Reviews:
Desk checks:
In this we usually review our own work. This is mostly conducted by the reviewer itself. There different approaches which can be used for this like checklists etc. Code Review and Design Review are two examples of it.
Buddy checking:
A person other than the author informally reviews a piece of work. Generally it does not require collection of data and can be carried out by taking random samples. It does not involve the use of checklists to guide inspection and is there for non repeatable
Walkthroughs:
Author of an artifact presenting a document or program to an audience of their peers. The audience asks questions and makes comments on the artifact being presented in an attempt to identify defects. It is also known as Team Debugging or Peer Reviews.
Inspections:
A formal evaluation technique in which software requirements, design or code are examined in detail by a person or a group other than the author to detect faults, violations of development standards, and other problems
So as you can judge easily that by using above techniques, we can improve our work products to a desirable level. All these require almost no documentation but help to improve quality of a given work product.
For details about our QA process and packages please visit our site http://www.askoli.com/web-application-testing or write your comments and feedback to us at info@askoli.com
