Monday, April 18, 2011

Peer Reviews are Cheap

In previous posts I've talked about how useful peer reviews can be. But some many folks say they are just too expensive. That just isn't so.  Here's the math.

You can write good embedded software at the rate of 1-2 lines of code per hour. (That is all source lines of code divided by all hours for a project, including requirements, test, etc.   Really, that is the number.)

Formal, rigorous, thorough peer reviews target 100-200 lines of code reviewed per hour (we're talking Fagan style inspections, which are quite formal, but still the most cost effective review method from all the data I've seen). Let's say you have 4 people in an inspection. That is 25-50 lines of code per person-hour.  If you include an hour of prep time for each person for a two-hour review, that is still 17-33 lines of code per person-hour.

Think you write code faster?  OK, let's say you're Agile and do 3 lines of code/hr (what I've seen in industry, and comes with increased risk we can discuss elsewhere).  That's still nowhere near the review productivity rate.

We're talking maybe 5%-10% of project effort to do heavy-weight reviews.  And it generally finds half the bugs. More importantly, it finds them early, so you don't have a lot of rework.

So why does everyone say it is too expensive?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please send me your comments. I read all of them, and I appreciate them. To control spam I manually approve comments before they show up. It might take a while to respond. I appreciate generic "I like this post" comments, but I don't publish non-substantive comments like that.

If you prefer, or want a personal response, you can send e-mail to comments@koopman.us.
If you want a personal response please make sure to include your e-mail reply address. Thanks!

Static Analysis Ranked Defect List

  Crazy idea of the day: Static Analysis Ranked Defect List. Here is a software analysis tool feature request/product idea: So many times we...