The Art of Software Testing, Second Edition

3.7. Peer Ratings

The last human review process is not associated with program testing (i.e., its objective is not to find errors). This process is included here, however, because it is related to the idea of code reading.

Peer rating is a technique of evaluating anonymous programs in terms of their overall quality, maintainability, extensibility, usability, and clarity. The purpose of the technique is to provide programmer self-evaluation.

A programmer is selected to serve as an administrator of the process. The administrator, in turn, selects approximately 6 to 20 participants (6 is the minimum to preserve anonymity). The participants are expected to have similar backgrounds (you shouldn't group Java application programmers with assembly language system programmers, for example). Each participant is asked to select two of his or her own programs to be reviewed. One program should be representative of what the participant considers to be his or her finest work; the other should be a program that the programmer considers to be poorer in quality.

Once the programs have been collected, they are randomly distributed to the participants. Each participant is given four programs to review. Two of the programs are the "finest" programs and two are "poorer" programs, but the reviewer is not told which is which. Each participant spends 30 minutes with each program and then completes an evaluation form after reviewing the program. After reviewing all four programs, each participant rates ...