Experiences on defining and evaluating an adapted review process

This paper presents our experiences with the introduction of a review process for software requirements documents in a development project of the Passenger Car Development business unit (PCD) of DaimlerChrylser AG. As software quality management and quality assurance must be carefully integrated into existing company processes or business cultures, we had to substantially adapt the review process to the specific needs of the above project and its context characteristics. The chief difference to the traditional procedure for conducting reviews as, for example, set out in [1] or [2] is that our review process has a strong workshop character with an emphasis on one of the most crucial success factors for reviews: sufficient time for the individual preparation of the reviewers. We also describe the phase of analyzing the effort and defect data captured with respect to cost benefit aspects and the quality of the reviewed documents in relation to each other.