Forms of Review Process Structures
Active Design Review
The Active Design Review process comprises three steps (Parnas & Weiss, 1985). In the first step the author presents an overview of the design artefact.
In the second step (defect detection) the author provides an open-ended questionnaire to help reviewers find defects in the design artefact.
The final step is defect collection. Review meetings focus on small segments of the overall artefact, one aspect at a time. An example of this might be checking for consistency between documented requirements and design functions. This helps to ensure that functions are correctly designed and implemented.
Two-Person Review
Roles in the Two-Person review are the author and the reviewer.
The Two-Person review empirically validates that developers' productivity can be improved since it maximizes the use of the resources of a review team and reduces the costs of having a large review team (Bisant & Lyle, 1989). However, one limitation is that it requires significant experience of reviewers in performing the review process.
N-Fold Review
This process rests on the premise that a single review team may find only a small number of defects in an artefact, whereas multiple teams working in parallel sessions should find a large number of defects. By dividing tasks, it is possible to ensure that groups will not duplicate each other’s efforts. Each team follows Fagan's six-step review process, and is comprised of three to four people.
The roles can be classified into 1) the author, 2) a moderator, and 3) reviewers.
The moderator is responsible for all the coordination activities. The defect examination time is about two hours for each team.
Phased Review
As the name implies, the review process is carried out in a series of partial reviews or mini-reviews. A review cannot progress to the next phase until all work (including rework) is completed for the current phase of review.
The reviews can be divided in two types: 1) single-reviewer approach, and 2) multiple-reviewer approach.
In the single-reviewer approach a single person examines the artefact. In the multiple reviewer approach, several reviewers individually examine the artefact using different checklists and then discuss the defects in a meeting.
The key drawback of a phased review is that it is a more costly method than other more conventional reviews
Review without meeting
The review meeting has been the core of the software review process in the last decade. In Fagan’s review, the key focus is on the review meeting phase where team members identify and discuss defects in a meeting.
Fagan (1976) believes that the review meeting is crucial since most defects can be detected during the meeting.In other words, team members can find more defects in a group discussion than would be found if all the defects found by individuals working without a meeting are combined. Although there is a significant body of research presenting the advantages of group meetings to the software review process, this research is contradicted by work which suggests that holding a review meeting does not have a significant effect on the review performance.The benefits of holding a review meeting are still debated in the software review literature. The key issue in this debate is whether defect detection is improved through a focus on individual activity, or whether it is improved through group
meetings.
[Source: Modern Software Review: Techniques and Technologies]
Also See:
Technical Review
Importance of Review
Pair Programming Review
Difference between Formal & Informal Reviews
Deciding Whether to do Formal or Informal Reviews
Software Design Reviews
Formal Review & Informal Review
Walkthrough and Inspection
Peer Review
Software Management Reviews
Test Case review
Code Review