An Empirical Implementation of Peer Review in Software Development

Abstract

Peer review is one of the most important quality assurance collaborative activities in software development processes. It is currently a Key Process Area (KPA) in several well known software process models. For some small/agile software development teams, it can be hard to deploy a whole model into their organizations. Based on our experience, we believe peer review can be of great help even if this is the only KPA implemented in a team. Therefore, we are proposing a Peer Review KPA implementation, which incorporates guidelines, processes, best practices, templates, customization and maturity levels. Along with a user study, we believe software development teams can benefit from the practice no matter which model they are using and which maturity level they are in.