Management Reviews & Metrics For Effective Management Review

This Tutorial Explains all about Management Reviews including Review Metrics and the Difference Between Audit and Management Review:

Management Review is an important aspect of managing any organization, system, or enterprise. Management Review Meeting must be carried out on a regular interval, it should have a defined structure and agenda.

The concerned manager must conduct these meetings at a defined schedule to keep the top management and team members informed about all the changes, revisions, and updates to the project.

Introduction To Management Reviews

• Focuses on the process rather than products.
• It should be an Organizational policy and the Manager’s responsibility.
• The Manager/Review leader should ensure that the environment exists to implement reviews.
• The Manager should implement a measurement plan to ensure the review provides effective values.
• Because testers have good domain knowledge, testers should be involved in reviews.
• Participants should have Review training.
• Reviews are the most cost-effective contributor to Quality.
• Reviews find defects in static documents.
• Reviews should be combined with other forms of testing techniques to have better and more Test Coverage.
• Review VS Static Analysis: Reviews eliminate the issue at requirement level before the problem is implemented into code, while Static Analysis helps to enforce coding standards and check for problems that may be difficult to fix later.
• Types of Reviews: Informal, Walkthrough, Technical, and Inspection.

Management Reviews And Audits

Management Reviews:

• Used to monitor processes, access status, and make decisions.
• Conducted by and for Managers having direct responsibility for the project.
• It can be conducted by and for stakeholders.
• Check consistency with deviations from plans.
• Check the adequacy of the management procedure.
• Access Project Risks.
• Evaluate the impact of actions and ways to measure those impacts.
• Produce a list of action items and issues to be resolved and decisions made.
• The retrospective is important.

Audits:

• Performed to demonstrate confirmation of the defined set of criteria.
• Conducted and monitored by the Lead Auditor.
• Evidence of compliance collected through interviews or by examining documents.
• Documented results include observations, recommendations, corrective actions and pass/fail assessment.

Managing Reviews

• It should be planned for all milestones.
• Should be held after Requirement and Design definition – working down to the lowest level.
• It should take place before, during and after Test Execution and other phases.
• The Test Manager should identify items to be reviewed and select an appropriate review.
• ROI of Reviews is the difference between the cost of conducting the review and the cost of dealing with the same defect at later stages.
• The objective of Review and Metrics should be defined during the planning stage.
• The number of reviews, types of reviews, organizing reviews and people involved in reviews depends upon size and complexity.
• The team conducting the reviews should be knowledgeable and devoted. The Test Manager should also consider back up reviewers.
• The Test Manager can compare the actual results with review reports.
• After each review, the Test Manager should collect review metrics, use review metrics as input when determining the ROI, provide feedback to stakeholders and review participants.
• In a case where the approved review is found defective at the later stage, the Test Manager should consider ways for which the review process might have allowed the defect to escape.

Metrics For Reviews

Product Evaluation

• Work product size ( LOC, Pages)
• Preparation time before the review.
• Time to conduct a review.
• Rework time to fix defects.
• Duration of the review process.
• The number of defects found and their severity.
• Average defect density.
• Estimated residual defects.

Process Evaluation

• Defect detection effectiveness.
• Improvement of review process effort and timings.
• % coverage of planned work product.
• Types of defect found and severity.
• The number of reviews.
• Estimated project time saved.
• Average defect effort.
• Cost of quality metrics for review.

Formal Reviews

• Defined entry and exit criteria.
• Checklist to be used by reviewers.
• Deliverables like reports and evaluation sheets
• Determine metrics.
• Prerequisites should be met

Conclusion

We hope, this tutorial provided you a clear idea about Management Reviews including the metrics used during this process. Management reviews result should be analyzed minutely and more frequent reviews should be scheduled to help in the growth of the organization.