One of the main activities of the review process is individual review or individual preparation. We can apply several review techniques during the individual review to uncover defects. These techniques can be used across all review types, including informal review, walkthrough, technical review, and inspection. However, the techniques' effectiveness may differ depending on the review type used.
Some examples of different individual review techniques are:
Let's discuss each one of them:
1. Ad Hoc Review
A review technique carried out by independent reviewers informally, without a structured process. In an ad-hoc review, reviewers are provided with little or no guidance on how the task should be performed. Also, ad hoc reviews need little preparation, and it is highly dependent on reviewers' skills. During the review, reviewers read the work product sequentially and document the issue as they encounter them. This technique may lead to many duplicate issues reported by different reviewers.
2. Checklist-based Review
It is a review technique guided by a list of questions or required attributes. Checklist-based review is a systematic technique where reviewers detect issues based on a checklist distributed during review initiation, generally by the facilitator. A review consists of a set of questions based on potential defects. The checklist is derived from experience, and it is specific to the type of work product under review.
The review checklist should be maintained regularly and include issue types missed in the previous review. If the checklists are outdated, the review won't be effective. Also, the review should not be limited to the given checklist. Reviewers should look for defects outside the checklist as well.
3. Scenarios and Dry Runs
In scenario-based reviews, structured guidelines are provided to the reviewers on how to read through the work product. Based on the expected usage of the work products, dry runs are performed on work products with the support of scenario-based reviews. Work products should be in a suitable format for scenario-based reviews such as use cases. Scenarios provide better guidelines than the checklist for identifying specific defect types. Reviewers should not be constrained to documented scenarios and should think beyond documents to identify more defect types.
4. Role-based Review
In Role-based review, work products are evaluated from the perspective of individual stakeholder roles. Here, typical roles are based on specific end-user types or specific roles in the organization. End User types are experienced, inexperienced, senior, child, etc. Organization-specific roles include user administrator, system administrator, performance tester, etc.
5. Perspective-based Reading
It is a review technique whereby reviewers evaluate the work product from different viewpoints. The principles of role-based review also apply to perspective-based reading because roles are similar. In perspective-based reading, reviewers take on different stakeholder viewpoints in individual reviewing. Stakeholders include the designer, test, marketing, operation, or end user. Perspective-based views lead to more in-depth individual reviewing with less duplication of issues across reviewers. Empirical studies have demonstrated perspective-based reading as the most beneficial general technique for reviewing requirements and technical work products. A key success factor is including and weighing different stakeholder viewpoints appropriately based on risks.
In addition, perspective-based reading also requires the reviewers to attempt to use the work product under review to generate the product they would derive from it. For example, a tester would try to generate draft acceptance tests if performing a perspective-based reading on a requirements specification to see if all the necessary information was included. Further, in perspective-based reading, checklists are expected to be used.
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