Chapter 15

 Review Techniques
Slide Set to accompany
Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 7/e
by Roger S. Pressman

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Reviews

... there is no particular reason

why your friend and colleague
cannot also be your sternest critic.
Jerry Weinberg

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 What Are Reviews?
 a meeting conducted by technical
people for technical people
 a technical assessment of a work
product created during the software
engineering process
 a software quality assurance
mechanism
 a training ground

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What Reviews Are Not

 A project summary or progress assessment

 A meeting intended specially to
communicate information
 A mechanism for political or personal
reprisal!

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What Do We Look For?
 Errors and defects
 Error—a quality problem found before the software is released
to end users
 Defect—a quality problem found only after the software has been
released to end-users
 We make this distinction because errors and defects have very
different economic, business, psychological, and human
impact
 However, the temporal distinction made between errors and
defects in this book is not mainstream thinking

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Defect Amplification
 A defect amplification model [IBM81] can be used to illustrate
the generation and detection of errors during the design and
code generation actions of a software process.

Defects Detection
Errors from Errors passed through
Previous step Percent Errors passed
Amplified errors 1:x Efficiency To next step

Newly generated errors

Development step

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Defect Amplification
 In the example provided in SEPA, Section 15.2,
 a software process that does NOT include reviews,
• yields 94 errors at the beginning of testing and
• Releases 12 latent defects to the field
 a software process that does include reviews,
• yields 24 errors at the beginning of testing and
• releases 3 latent defects to the field
 A cost analysis indicates that the process with NO
reviews costs approximately 3 times more than the
process with reviews, taking the cost of correcting the
latent defects into account

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Metrics
 The total review effort and the total number of
errors discovered are defined as:
• Ereview = Ep + Ea + Er
• Errtot = Errminor + Errmajor
 Defect density represents the errors found per
unit of work product reviewed.
• Defect density = Errtot / WPS
 where …

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Metrics
 Preparation effort, Ep—the effort (in person-hours) required to
review a work product prior to the actual review meeting
 Assessment effort, Ea— the effort (in person-hours) that is
expending during the actual review
 Rework effort, Er— the effort (in person-hours) that is
dedicated to the correction of those errors uncovered during
the review
 Work product size, WPS—a measure of the size of the work
product that has been reviewed (e.g., the number of UML
models, or the number of document pages, or the number of
lines of code)
 Minor errors found, Errminor—the number of errors found that
can be categorized as minor (requiring less than some pre-
specified effort to correct)
 Major errors found, Errmajor— the number of errors found that
can be categorized as major (requiring more than some pre-
specified effort to correct)
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An Example—I
 If past history indicates that
 the average defect density for a requirements model
is 0.6 errors per page, and a new requirement model
is 32 pages long,
 a rough estimate suggests that your software team
will find about 19 or 20 errors during the review of the
document.
 If you find only 6 errors, you’ve done an extremely
good job in developing the requirements model or
your review approach was not thorough enough.

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An Example—II
 The effort required to correct a minor model error (immediately after
the review) was found to require 4 person-hours.
 The effort required for a major requirement error was found to be 18
person-hours.
 Examining the review data collected, you find that minor errors occur
about 6 times more frequently than major errors. Therefore, you can
estimate that the average effort to find and correct a requirements error
during review is about 6 person-hours.
 Requirements related errors uncovered during testing require an
average of 45 person-hours to find and correct. Using the averages
noted, we get:
 Effort saved per error = Etesting – Ereviews
 45 – 6 = 30 person-hours/error
 Since 22 errors were found during the review of the requirements
model, a saving of about 660 person-hours of testing effort would be
achieved. And that’s just for requirements-related errors.

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Overall
 Effort expended with and without reviews

with reviews
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Reference Model

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Informal Reviews
 Informal reviews include:
 a simple desk check of a software engineering work
product with a colleague
 a casual meeting (involving more than 2 people) for the
purpose of reviewing a work product, or
 the review-oriented aspects of pair programming
 pair programming encourages continuous review as
a work product (design or code) is created.
 The benefit is immediate discovery of errors and better
work product quality as a consequence.

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Formal Technical Reviews
 The objectives of an FTR are:
 to uncover errors in function, logic, or implementation for
any representation of the software
 to verify that the software under review meets its
requirements
 to ensure that the software has been represented according
to predefined standards
 to achieve software that is developed in a uniform manner
 to make projects more manageable
 The FTR is actually a class of reviews that includes
walkthroughs and inspections.

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The Review Meeting
 Between three and five people (typically)
should be involved in the review.
 Advance preparation should occur but should
require no more than two hours of work for
each person.
 The duration of the review meeting should be
less than two hours.
 Focus is on a work product (e.g., a portion of a
requirements model, a detailed component design,
source code for a component)

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 The Players
review
leader standards bearer (SQA)

producer

maintenance
oracle

recorder reviewer
user rep
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The Players
 Producer—the individual who has developed the work
product
 informs the project leader that the work product is complete
and that a review is required
 Review leader—evaluates the product for readiness,
generates copies of product materials, and distributes
them to two or three reviewers for advance preparation.
 Reviewer(s)—expected to spend between one and two
hours reviewing the product, making notes, and
otherwise becoming familiar with the work.
 Recorder—reviewer who records (in writing) all important
issues raised during the review.

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Conducting the Review
 Review the product, not the producer.
 Set an agenda and maintain it.
 Limit debate and rebuttal.
 Enunciate problem areas, but don't attempt to solve
every problem noted.
 Take written notes.
 Limit the number of participants and insist upon advance
preparation.
 Develop a checklist for each product that is likely to be
reviewed.
 Allocate resources and schedule time for FTRs.
 Conduct meaningful training for all reviewers.
 Review your early reviews.
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Review Options Matrix
IPR * WT IN RRR
trained leader no yes yes yes
agenda established maybe yes yes yes
reviewers prepare in advance maybe yes yes yes
producer presents product maybe yes no no
“reader” presents product no no yes no
recorder takes notes maybe yes yes yes
checklists used to find errors no no yes no
errors categorized as found no no yes no
issues list created no yes yes yes
team must sign-off on result no yes yes maybe

* IPR—informal peer review WT—Walkthrough

IN—Inspection RRR—round robin review
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Sample-Driven Reviews (SDRs)
 SDRs attempt to quantify those work products that are
primary targets for full FTRs.
To accomplish this …
 Inspect a fraction ai of each software work product, i.
Record the number of faults, fi found within ai.
 Develop a gross estimate of the number of faults within
work product i by multiplying fi by 1/ai.
 Sort the work products in descending order according to
the gross estimate of the number of faults in each.
 Focus available review resources on those work
products that have the highest estimated number of
faults.

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 Metrics Derived from Reviews
inspection time per page of documentation
inspection time per KLOC or FP
inspection effort per KLOC or FP
errors uncovered per reviewer hour
errors uncovered per preparation hour
errors uncovered per SE task (e.g., design)
number of minor errors (e.g., typos)
number of major errors
(e.g., nonconformance to req.)
number of errors found during preparation

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(McGraw-Hill 2009). Slides copyright 2009 by Roger Pressman. 22