Selective Homeworkless Reviews

We describe a version of review/inspection called selective homeworkless review. In these reviews, moderators are taught how to select artifacts for review and review methodologies with little or no preparation. Many review and inspection methodologies are known in the literature and used in industry with very good results. The main issue we faced was not how to tune an existing inspection methodology, but rather how to get people to seriously and continuously inspect their artifacts. With the shrinking of the release cycle, people try to avoid front-loaded methodologies such as reviews, which seem to waste time early on. This is true both at the organizational level, where the overall cost is considered and at the day-to-day level, where time for preparation needs to be found. Because the reasons for rejecting existing inspection techniques were more organizational than technical, the way our methodology overcomes these objections is as central to the paper as the selective homeworkless review methodology itself. We introduced selective homeworkless reviews three years ago. We now have convincing evidence that this methodology can be introduced even in organizations that are resistant to formal inspections, leading to significant improvements in quality.