Review process in Static Testing:

As per IEEE, the review is process during which a work, product or set of work products are presented to project personnel , managers , users or other interested parties for com mentor approval. Reviews vary from very informal to formal (i.e well well structured and regulated). Although inspection is perhaps the most documented and formal review process is related to factors such as maturity of the development process, any legal or regulatory requirements or the need for an audit trail. In practice the informal review is perhaps the most common type of review. Informal reviews are applied at various times during early stages in the life cycle of a document, A two person team can conduct an informal review, as the author can ask a colleague to review a document or code.

In,

later stages these reviews will often involve more people and a meeting.This normally involves peers of the author, who try to find defects in the document under review and discuss these defects in a review meeting. The goal is to help the author and to improve the quality of the document. Informal reviews come in various shapes and forms, but all have one characteristics in common- they are not documented.In contrasts to informal reviews, formal reviews follow a formal process. A typical formal review process consists of six main steps.

• Planning
• Kick-Off
• Preparation
• Review Meeting
• Rework
• Follow-Up

Planning:

The review process for a particular review begins with a request for review by the author to the moderator. A moderator is often assigned to take care of the scheduling (dates, time, place and invitation). of the review. On a project level, the project planning needs to allow time for review and rework activities, thus providing engineers with time to thoroughly participate in reviews.for more formal reviews eg. Inspections, the moderator always performs as entry check and defines at this stages formal exit criteria. The entry check is carried out to ensure that the reviewer’s time is not wasted on a document that is not ready for review.

Kick Off:

It is an optional step in review meeting. Kick- off step. The goal of this meeting is to get everybody on the same wavelength regarding the document under review and to commit to the time that will be spent on checking. Also the result of the entry check and defined exit criteria are discussed in case of a more formal review. In general a Kick-off is highly recommended since there is a strong positive effect of a Kick off meeting on the motivation of reviewers and thus effectiveness of the review process. At customer sites 70 % more major defects has been found per page as a result of performing this kickoff. Roles assignments, rate of checking process changes and possible other questions are also discussed during this meeting.

Preparation:

The participants work individually on the document under review using the related documents, procedures rules and checklists which are provided. The individual participants identify defects, questions them and comments accordingly to their understanding of the document role. We generally say there is success in preparation factor when we have more number of pages checked per hour. This is called checking rate .All the issues are recorded using logging form. Even spelling mistakes are recorded but revealed in the review meeting. The document will be given to the author at the end of the logging meeting. Using checklists we can make this meeting more effective and efficient.

Review Meeting:

The meeting generally consists of the following phases depending partially on the type of review. Logging Phase, Discussion Phase and Decision Phase. During Logging Phase the issues like defects which have been identified during the preparation are mentioned page by page, reviewer by reviewer and are logged either by author or by a scribe. A separate person to do the logging is especially useful for the formal review types such as an inspection. If an issue needs to be discussed during the logging phase, the item is logged and then handled in the discussion phase. A detailed discussion on whether or not an issue is a defect is not very meaningful, as it is much more efficient to simply log it and proceed to the next one. Further more, in-spite of the opinion of the team, a discarded and discussed defect may well turn out to be real one during rework. . Every defects severity I mean whether it is critical or minor or major will be discussed in the decision phase.

Rework:

Based on the defects detected, the author will improve the document under review step by step. not every defect found is led to rework. It is the author’s responsibility to judge if a defect has to be fixed. If nothing is done about issue for a certain reason, it should be reported to at least indicate that the author has considered the issue. Changes that are made to the document should be easy to identify during follow-up. Therefore the author has to indicate where changes are made ( e.g using “track changes “ in word processing software).

Follow-up:

The moderator is responsible for ensuring that satisfactory actions have been taken action on all known defects, , process improvement suggestions and change requests. Although the moderator checks to make sure that the author has taken action on all known defects, It is not necessary for the moderator to check all the corrections in detail. If it is decided that all participants will check the updated document , the moderator takes care of the distribution and collects the feedback .