A value-based review process for prioritizing artifacts

Abstract

As a new contribution to Value-based V&V process development, a systematic and multi-criteria process is proposed to quantitatively determine the Value-based V&V artifact priority that reviewers can follow for their reviews. This process enables reviewers to prioritize artifacts to be reviewed in a more cost-effective way based on more sophisticated and comprehensive factors, such as importance, quality risks, dependency and cost of V&V investments. Some qualitative and quantitative evidence is provided from a comparative experiment with 22 real-client e-services projects over two years of a graduate software engineering team-project course. It shows that the value-based artifact prioritization enabled reviewers to better focus on artifacts with high importance and risks, to capture issues with high impact in a timely manner, and to improve the cost-effectiveness of reviews.