ABSTRACT
The software engineering literature has identified a number of techniques for quality review of artefacts produced during the software development lifecycle-specifications, designs, code and suchlike. Most of these techniques are directly applicable when reviewing other project documents. Peer review underpins most scientific and academic progress. In the software engineering context, Weigers identifies seven approaches to peer review, based on the degree of formality applied to the review process. Pair programming is a technique, derived from Extreme Programming (Beck and Andres, 2004), whereby two people work together to develop an artefact, typically code. The author forwards their work product to several other people, asking for feedback. This is similar to a peer deskcheck, but with several reviewers. Open source software development, for example, often favours informal reviews (the distributed nature of the teams makes formal review difficult), with the large number of potential reviewers compensating for the lack of formal process.
