The Soft Side of Peer Reviews
High-quality technical work requires that you get a little help from your friends through peer reviews, but they must be skillfully done.
Peer review is an activity in which people other than the author of a deliverable examine it for defects and improvement opportunities. Peer reviews are a powerful quality aid in any technical discipline, particularly software and hardware engineering. After experiencing the benefits of software peer reviews for decades, I would never work in a team that didn’t perform them.
Many organizations struggle to implement an effective peer review program. The barriers to successful reviews often are social and cultural in nature, not technical. My book Peer Reviews in Software: A Practical Guide describes the nuts and bolts of how to perform reviews. This article explores some of those soft-side aspects of having people look over each other’s work. These suggestions might help your peer review program succeed where others have failed.
Scratch Each Other’s Back
Asking your colleagues to point out errors in your work is a learned — not instinctive — behavior. We all take pride in the work we do and the products we create. We don’t like to admit that we make mistakes, we don’t realize…
