An exploratory study of software review in practice

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to identify the key software review inputs that significantly affect review performance in practice. Five in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with different IT organizations. From the interviews' results, the typical issues for conducting software review include (1) selecting right reviewers to perform a defect detection task, (2) the limitation of time and resources for organizing and conducting software review (3) no standard and specific guideline to measure an effective review for different types of software artifacts (i.e. requirement, design, code and test cases). Thus the result shows that the experience (i.e. knowledge and skills) of reviewers is the most significant input influencing software review performance.