A Model of Costs and Benefits of Reviews

The benefits of reviews are well-known in software quality assurance. Nevertheless, in industry they are often used in a truncated or shortened way, if at all. The costs are obvious and arise immediately, whereas the benefit of improved quality is hard to measure, and is achieved only in the long run. As decisions often focus on reducing development time and effort, we present an estimation model for costs and benefits of specification and design reviews. The estimation results are discussed in this paper. For in-process benefits, benefits in maintenance and in usage, the results match reported experiences.