Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
workflow may be eager to have specification document approved as soon as
possible to start some other task. The quality of the product is a direct reflection of
the professional competence of the SQA group. The person leading the walk-
through guides the other members of the walkthrough team through the document
to uncover any faults. It is not the task of the team to correct faults, but merely to
record them for later correction. There are four reasons for this:
1. A correction produced by a committee within the time constraints of the
walkthrough is likely to be lower in quality than a correction produced by an
individual trained in the necessary techniques.
2. A correction produced by a walkthrough team of five individuals takes at least
as much time as a correction produced by one person.
3. Not all the items flagged as faults actually are incorrect.
4. There simply is not enough time in the walkthrough to both detect and correct
faults. No walkthrough should be longer than 2 h.
There are two ways of conducting a walkthrough. The first is participant driven.
Participants present their lists of unclear items. The second way of conducting a
review is document driven. A person responsible for the document walks through
with the reviewers interrupting either with their prepared comments or comments
triggered by the presentation. This approach is likely to be more thorough. The
primary role of the walkthrough leader is to elicit questions and facilitate dis-
cussion. A walkthrough is an interactive process; it is not supposed to be one-sided
instruction by the presenter. It also is essential that the walkthrough is not used as a
means of evaluating the participants. To prevent this conflict of interests, the
person responsible for a given workflow should not also be directly responsible for
evaluating any member of the walkthrough team for that workflow (Schach
2007
).
10.4.3 Inspections
Inspection goes far beyond a walkthrough and has five formal steps:
1. An overview of the document to be inspected is given by one of the individuals
responsible for producing that document.
2. In the preparation, the participants try to understand the document in detail.
3. To begin the inspection, one participant walks through the document with the
inspection team, ensuring that every item is covered and that every branch is
taken at least once.
4. In the rework, the individual responsible for the document resolves all the faults
and problems noted in the written report.
5. In the follow-up, the moderator must ensure that every issue raised has been
resolved satisfactorily.
