3.2.2. Review Process Activities
The ISO/IEC 20246 standard defines a generic review process that provides a structured but flexible
framework from which a specific review process may be tailored to a particular situation. If the required
review is more formal, then more of the tasks described for the different activities will be needed.
The size of many work products makes them too large to be covered by a single review. The review
process may be invoked a couple of times to complete the review for the entire work product.
The activities in the review process are:
• Planning. During the planning phase, the scope of the review, which comprises the purpose, the
work product to be reviewed, quality characteristics to be evaluated, areas to focus on, exit
criteria, supporting information such as standards, effort and the timeframes for the review, shall
be defined.
• Review initiation. During review initiation, the goal is to make sure that everyone and everything
involved is prepared to start the review. This includes making sure that every participant has
access to the work product under review, understands their role and responsibilities and receives
everything needed to perform the review.
• Individual review. Every reviewer performs an individual review to assess the quality of the work
product under review, and to identify anomalies, recommendations, and questions by applying
one or more review techniques (e.g., checklist-based reviewing, scenario-based reviewing). The
ISO/IEC 20246 standard provides more depth on different review techniques. The reviewers log
all their identified anomalies, recommendations, and questions.
• Communication and analysis. Since the anomalies identified during a review are not
necessarily defects, all these anomalies need to be analyzed and discussed. For every anomaly,
the decision should be made on its status, ownership and required actions. This is typically done
in a review meeting, during which the participants also decide what the quality level of reviewed
work product is and what follow-up actions are required. A follow-up review may be required to
complete actions.
• Fixing and reporting. For every defect, a defect report should be created so that corrective
actions can be followed-up. Once the exit criteria are reached, the work product can be accepted.
The review results are reported.
3.2.3. Roles and Responsibilities in Reviews
Reviews involve various stakeholders, who may take on several roles. The principal roles and their
responsibilities are:
• Manager – decides what is to be reviewed and provides resources, such as staff and time for the
review
• Author – creates and fixes the work product under review
• Moderator (also known as the facilitator) – ensures the effective running of review meetings,
including mediation, time management, and a safe review environment in which everyone can
speak freely
• Scribe (also known as recorder) – collates anomalies from reviewers and records review
information, such as decisions and new anomalies found during the review meeting
• Reviewer – performs reviews. A reviewer may be someone working on the project, a subject
matter expert, or any other stakeholder
• Review leader – takes overall responsibility for the review such as deciding who will be involved,
and organizing when and where the review will take place
Other, more detailed roles are possible, as described in the ISO/IEC 20246 standard.