Notes:
- Peer review finds half the defects for 10% of the project cost. (Blog)
- But they only work if you actually do the reviews! (Blog)
- If you're finding more than 50% of your defects in test instead of peer review, then your peer reviews are broken. It's as simple as that. (Blog)
- Here's a peer review checklist to get you started. (Blog) You should customize it to your needs.
Full tutorial video: https://vimeo.com/181433327
For more about Edge Case Research and how to subscribe to our video training channel, please see this Blog posting.
Somebody asked me on social media if you can do better than waiting until the end of the project to know if your peer reviews are effective. Here is my reply:
ReplyDeleteHindsight is when you are sure, but if you are in trouble you often know well before then.
- If you aren't finding about 1-2 major defects per hour in peer review, probably they aren't working. (It all depends, but this is a common finding.)
- If after the first week of integration testing you've found more defects than you found in all of peer reviews, you know you're in trouble. More testing isn't going to make the ratio improve as you find more bugs in test
- If you are running sprints, you'll know by the end of a sprint at least for defects found for all previous sprints and that sprint
- If you're doing a new version, you know how you did on the last version and whether you need to fix your peer reviews for the next version