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.

These items are provided on a shareware basis. All payments are donated to the Norm Kerth Benefit Fund. Norm is a highly respected software consultant who suffered a disabling brain injury in an automobile accident (details). A suggested donation is $10 per downloaded item. You can donate through PayPal or by mailing a check made out to "Norm Kerth Benefit Fund" to Process Impact, 11491 SE 119th Drive, Happy Valley, OR 97086-8278. Unfortunately, fewer than 0.1% of visitors who download items make any payment. Your payment will help ensure that these items remain available and that Norm can keep his house. Thank you!

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:

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.
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.
DevPartner from Micro Focus 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.
Several commercial versions of the Lint static code analyzer are available, primarily for programs written in C and C++, but also Fortran and Java. Examples are Lint-PLUS for C and FortranLint from Cleanscape Software International and Flexelint from Gimpel Software.
Splint is a tool to statically check C programs for security vulnerabilities and coding mistakes.
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: Wednesday, 21-Oct-2009 13:39:29 EDT