Definitions of Peer Review, Walkthrough, Inspection

Shimin asks, What do you mean by “peer review”? Here are my definitions:

Peer review. An author asks a peer to read, comment, and critique a work artifact. If the work artifact is code, the reviewer will read the code, and may even develop and run some unit tests to check that the code works as advertised.

Walkthrough. An author presents the work artifact to others. If the work artifact is code, the author walks through the code, explaining what this pieces does, what that piece does. If the author is like me, the author trails off in the middle of a sentence and says, “Oh no, that's not what I wanted.” Or, “There's the problem.” 🙂

Inspection. An author requests the services of a moderator, scribe, reader/reviewers in a formal meeting. The moderator books the room, sends out the material. The reader/reviewers read the material before the meeting. During the meeting, the reader/reviewers take turns reading the work artifact out loud. The scribe takes notes of issues the reader/reviewers discovered in advance and during the meeting.

Let me know if you have other definitions, or other techniques that don't fall into these categories. These techniques are useful for any work product. You may have to modify them for non-code work products.