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A REVIEW IS ANY ACTIVITY IN WHICH A WORK PRODUCT is distributed to reviewers who examine it

and give feedback. Different work products will go through different kinds of reviews: the
team may do a very thorough, technical review of a software requirements specification,
while the vision and scope document will be passed around via email and have higher-
level walkthroughs. (This book was reviewed by a wide range of experts including sea-
soned project managers, university faculty, and business executives.) This chapter covers
several kinds of reviews, each of which may be appropriate for different work products
and at various points during the software project.
Reviews are useful not only for finding and eliminating defects, but also for gaining con-
sensus among the project team, securing approval from stakeholders, and aiding in profes-
sional development for team members. In all cases, the work product coming out of the
review has fewer defects than it had when it was submitted—even though the author
thought it was “complete” before the review. Every defect that is found during a review is
a defect that someone did not have to spend time tracking down later in the project.
There are many ways that a work product can be reviewed. Each kind of review is appro-
priate for different audiences or kinds of work product. The purpose of all reviews is to
ensure that each reviewer is satisfied that the work product is correct, and that his or her
perspective is represented.
The goal of every review is to save the project team time and effort. It’s much easier to fix
the problems on paper, before they cause software to be built incorrectly. An effective way
to make sure defects are caught early is to schedule many reviews over the course of the
project to catch the defects before they become deeply embedded in the software. By
reviewing each work product before it is approved, a project manager sets those checkpoints
and ensures that defects are caught early, before they are repeated in later work products.

Inspections

An inspection is one of the most common sorts of review found in software projects. The
goal of the inspection is for all of the inspectors to reach consensus on a work product and
approve it for use in the project. Commonly inspected work products include software
requirements specifications (see Chapter 6) and test plans (see Chapter 8). In an inspec-

tion, a work product is selected for review and a team is gathered for an inspection meet-
ing to review the work product. A moderator is chosen to moderate the meeting. Each
inspector prepares for the meeting by reading the work product and noting each defect. In
an inspection, a defect is any part of the work product that will keep an inspector from
approving it. For example, if the team is inspecting a software requirements specification,
each defect will be text in the document that an inspector disagrees with. The goal of the
inspection is to repair all of the defects so that everyone on the inspection team can
approve the work product.

Most project managers have seen their projects get delayed because of scope creep and
unnecessary work caused by changes that, had they been caught earlier, would have
required much less work to fix. One of the most common complaints from project team

74 CHAPTER FIVE