Does every formal peer review really need to take place? An industrial case study
Keith Roseberry, Mary Noelle Sheppard, Robert Wallis, Ye Yang · Procedia Computer Science · 2019
Existing studies on formal peer reviews (FPR) are mostly based on design and code review practices observed from the open source software (OSS) community, and there is a lack of studies and evidence from proprietary, large scale software development in systems engineering settings. This study fills the gap by reporting an industrial case study on FPR practices in a safety-critical embedded system development organization. First, we follow the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) methodology to establish a set of metrics for understanding FPR practices and the resulting effectiveness. Second, we collect the metric data from 100 programs employing FPR practices on a variety of document types. Third, we analyze the data and derive answers to a set of questions defined in the GQM. The study contributes to more comprehensive understanding of FPR practices and effectiveness evaluation, and the findings reported here may serve as a basis for process improvements initiatives in similar settings.