Goodies for Peer Reviews

Process Assets | Training | Tools | Other Resource Links

These documents and links are presented to assist your practice of software peer reviews. You are free to use them, to modify them to best suit your needs, and to share them with your colleagues. However, you may not sell or license them, incorporate them into any commercial product or service, or post them on a public web site accessible outside your company. NOTE: The Excel files and some of the Word files contain macros.

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Process Assets for Software Peer Reviews and Inspections

These items are explained in Peer Reviews in Software: A Practical Guide by Karl E. Wiegers.

Review Forms:

Inspection Data Spreadsheets:

Process Description:

Sample peer review process description

Defect Checklists:

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Some Sources of Training on Peer Reviews and Inspections

North America:

eLearning Training:

Process Impact offers a comprehensive eLearning version of our "Software Inspections and Peer Reviews" seminar, with more content than the 1-day instructor-led course contains.

Europe:

Video Aid:

The Software Engineering Institute technical report CMU/SEI-91-EM-5 describes a videotape called "Scenes of Software Inspections" to assist with inspection training.

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Tools to Assist with Software Peer Reviews

Some Review Support Tools:

InSpec from Integrated Software Metrics is a web-based commercial product for managing code and document reviews. Users can create inspections, edit preparation logs for current inspections, enter time records (for tracking ROI for inspections), and perform various other administrative tasks.
ReviewPro from Software Development Technologies is a web-based commercial product that automates aspects of peer reviews to facilitate communication, accommodate your preferred review process and checklists, store data about reviews conducted, and generate charts and reports on accumulated review metrics data.
Codestriker is an open-source web-based application that supports online code reviewing. It's available under the GNU public license. Codestriker integrates with several version-control and defect-tracking tools.
Code Reviewer from SmartBear Software is a Windows-based commercial tool that facilitates code review by remote reviewers. It builds an audit trail of review activities and integrates with several commercial version-control products.
CSRS is the Collaborative Software Review System, available under the GNU public license. It supports the FTArm technique for asynchronous reviews, when participants cannot easily meet physically.
LEAP is a Lightweight, Empirical, Automated, Portable tool for collection and analysis of personal software development data, including review data. It's also available under the GNU public license.
ASSIST, the Asynchronous/Synchronous Software Inspection Support Tool, is available for research use. Displaying documents in a browser, it assists (get it?) both individual and group inspection activities performed either synchronously or asynchronously.

Some Code and Document Analyzers:

Reasoning provides an InstantQA (sm) service (not product) to inspect C and C++ code.
CodeWizard is a commercial tool from Parasoft that scans C or C++ code to detect violations of some 170 established coding standards in those languages.
NuMega DevPartner from Compuware NuMega analyzes source code in languages including C#, Visual Basic .NET and ASP .NET for potential problems, rule nonconformances, and violations of coding standards that could lead to problems.
Scott Meyers and Martin Klaus compiled a list of additional tools that perform static analysis of programs written in C++.
Several commercial versions of the Lint static code analyzer are available, primarily for programs written in C and C++, but also Fortran and Java. A few examples are Lint-PLUS for C and FortranLint from Cleanscape Software International, Flexelint from Gimpel Software, ProLint from Productivity through Software plc, Code Analyzer from WebGain, and LCLint available under the Gnu Public License.
ARM (Automated Requirement Measurement) is a free tool provided by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to scan requirements specifications for specific words and phrases indicative of quality problems, such as weak, fuzzy, and ambiguous terms that will inevitably lead to miscommunications.

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Links to Other Peer Review Resources

Don O'Neill wrote an excellent summary of peer reviews for the Encyclopedia of Software Engineering. Don also has information about the National Software Quality Experiment, with benchmark performance data collected from thousands of inspections.
Tom Gilb has made many of his writings, slide presentations, and resources on inspections available for downloading.

Last Modified: Monday, 15-Sep-2008 22:30:05 EDT