A software review is "A process or meeting during which a software product is examined by a project personnel, managers, users, customers, user representatives, or other interested parties for comment or approval".

In this context, the term "software product" means "any technical document or partial document, produced as a deliverable of a software development activity", and may include documents such as contracts, project plans and budgets, requirements documents, specifications, designs, source code, user documentation, support and maintenance documentation, test plans, test specifications, standards, and any other type of specialist work product.

Varieties of software review

Software reviews may be divided into three categories:

    Software peer reviews are conducted by the author of the work product, or by one or more colleagues of the author, to evaluate the technical content and/or quality of the work.

    Software management reviews are conducted by management representatives to evaluate the status of work done and to make decisions regarding downstream activities.

    Software audit reviews are conducted by personnel external to the software project, to evaluate compliance with specifications, standards, contractual agreements, or other criteria.

Value of reviews

 The most obvious value of software reviews (especially formal reviews) is that they can identify issues earlier and more cheaply than they would be identified by testing or by field use (the defect detection process). The cost to find and fix a defect by a well-conducted review may be one or two orders of magnitude less than when the same defect is found by test execution or in the field.

A second, but ultimately more important, value of software reviews is that they can be used to train technical authors in the development of extremely low-defect documents, and also to identify and remove process inadequacies that encourage defects (the defect prevention process).

This is particularly the case for peer reviews if they are conducted early and often, on samples of work, rather than waiting until the work has been completed. Early and frequent reviews of small work samples can identify systematic errors in the Author's work processes, which can be corrected before further faulty work is done. This improvement in Author skills can dramatically reduce the time it takes to develop a high-quality technical document, and dramatically decrease the error-rate in using the document in downstream processes.