Active design reviews: Principles and practices

Although many new software design techniques have emerged in the past 15 years, there have been few changes to the procedures for reviewing the designs produced using these techniques. This report describes an improved technique, based on the following ideas, for reviewing designs. 1.1. The efforts of each reviewer should be focused on those aspects of the design that suit his or her experience and expertise.2.2. The characteristics of the reviewers needed should be explicitly specified before reviewers are selected.3.3. Reviewers should be asked to make positive assertions about the design rather than simply allowed to point out defects.4.4. The designers pose questions to the reviewers, rather than vice versa. These questions are posed on a set of questionnaires that requires careful study of some aspect of the design.5.5. Interaction between designers and reviewers occurs in small meetings involving two to four people rather than meetings of large groups.Illustrations of these ideas are drawn from the application of active design reviews to the Naval Research Laboratory's Software Cost Reduction project.