Verification, Validation, and Testing of Engineered Systems

4.4 PARTICIPATE IN REVIEWS

4.4.1 Expert Team Reviews

We use the phrase expert team reviews as a generic term which includes inspections, walkthroughs, audits and peer reviews. A systematic description of the first three methods is available from, among other places, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standard for Software Reviews (IEEE-STD-1028, 1997). Notionally, there are clear differences among the four types of reviews, but in practice, they often are carried out in a pretty similar ways. The following is a short description of the four types of reviews:

• Inspections. Inspections are a class of review processes developed at the International Business Machine (IBM) by Fagan (1976). This process was later improved by Radice (2001) and then Gilb and Graham (1993) and again by Gilb (2008). The process is characterized by examining documents (and computer code in case of software inspections) as well as collecting various metrics about the inspection process itself. This information is used to manage future individual inspections as well as for long-term process improvement. The method of studying documentation is often based on an analysis of a primary document; however, the process is not necessarily sequential. It is characterized by any analysis tactic (e.g., assigning specialized roles to individual inspectors and selecting particular documents or sections of them) that best suits the inspection objectives (e.g., maximizing the effectiveness of inspections, ...