Role of Technical Reviews in Software Testing

Technical Reviews:
Technical reviews include all the kinds of reviews that are used to detect defects in requirements, design, code, test cases, and other work products. Reviews vary in level of formality and effectiveness, and they play a more critical role in maximizing development speed than testing does.

The least formal and most common kind of review is the walkthrough, which is any meeting at which two or more developers review technical work with the purpose of improving its quality. Walkthroughs are useful to rapid development because you can use them to detect defects earlier than you can with testing.

Code reading is a somewhat more formal review process than a walkthrough but nominally applies only to code. In code reading, the author of the code hands out source listings to two or more reviewers. The reviewers read the code and report any errors to the code’s author. A study at NASA’s Software Engineering Laboratory found that code reading detected about twice as many defects per hour of effort as testing (Card 1987). That suggests that, on a rapid-development project, some combination of code reading and testing would be more schedule-effective than testing alone.

Inspections are the most formal kind of technical review, and they have been found to be extremely effective in detecting defects throughout a project. Developers are trained in the use of inspection techniques and play specific roles during the inspection process. The "moderator" hands out the material to be inspected before the inspection meeting. The "reviewers" examine the material before the meeting and use checklists to stimulate their reviews. During the inspection meeting, the "author" paraphrases the material, the reviewers identify errors, and the "scribe" records the errors. After the meeting, the moderator produces an inspection report that describes each defect and indicates what will be done about it. Throughout the inspection process you gather data about defects, hours spent correcting defects, and hours spent on inspections so that you can analyze the effectiveness of your software-development process and improve it.

Because they can be used early in the development cycle, inspections have been found to produce net schedule savings of 10 to 30 percent (Gilb and Graham 1993). One study of large programs even found that each hour spent on inspections avoided an average of 33 hours of maintenance, and inspections were up to 20 times more efficient than testing (Russell 1991).

Comment on Technical Reviews:
Technical reviews are a useful and important supplement to testing. Reviews find defects earlier, which saves time and is good for the schedule. They are more cost effective on a per-defect-found basis because they detect both the symptom of the defect and the underlying cause of the defect at the same time. Testing detects only the symptom of the defect; the developer still has to isolate the cause by debugging. Reviews tend to find a higher percentage of defects (Jones 1986). And reviews serve as a time when developers share their knowledge of best practices with each other, which increases their rapid-development capability over time. Technical reviews are thus a critical component of any development effort that aims to achieve the shortest possible schedule.