A software review is a procedure where a software product is inspected by personnels, users and/or representatives, managers, customers and other involved parties for their comments or approval. Software product refers to any nominal and/or incomplete documents created as a deliverable of software development program such as project plans, contracts, budgets, and other required documents, source code, arrangements, user documentation, designs, test plans, support and maintenance documentation, standards, test specifications, and other types of specialist work products.

Software reviews are classified into three classes:

Firstly, Peer reviews which are performed by the responsible person in order to assess the technical content and/or the superiority of the work. Secondly, Management reviews which are performed by the management legislature in order to assess the grade of work completed and to take actions regarding the downstream and finally the Audit reviews which are performed by the recruits in order to assess the fulfillment of the criteria with the specifications, standards, contractual agreements, or any other criteria.

There are five types of Code reviews, pair programming, inspection, walkthrough and technical review and which are as follows:
o Code review is a way of systematic assessment of computer source code.

o Pair programming is one such code review in which two people work together to develop a code at same workstation.

o Walkthrough is the process where the person responsible leads the members of the team through a software product and where the questions are asked by the participants and comments are noted regarding the faults.

o Inspection is an official peer review in which the reviewers subsequently follows a process to find faults.

o Technical review type of peer review where team consisting of skilled personnels inspects the
correctness of the product for its purposes and discovers the difference arising from the specifications and/or standards.

Importance of reviews

The main advantage of the software review is that they recognize the problems earlier and easily than identified by the field using the defect detection process. The defects that are found and fixed by the reviewers are two orders less than those found in the field. Another importance of the software review is to guide the person responsible in developing the fault less documents and to make out and get rid off the insufficiency that causes faults through using the process of defect detection.

A common principle is that the earlier the nominal documents is presented the larger the chances of defect it has. Therefore the furthermost value will decrease from the previous reviews of the documents.

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Author: Tom Greaves
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Unix inter-process communication (IPC)