Critical Analysis / Inspections / Expert Assessments

Critical Analysis / Inspections / Expert Assessments

Expert assessments are used in one form or another in most software development projects. One of the tasks assigned to personnel of the quality assurance departments is to perform statistical sampling inspection, reading and marking the user or client documentation. This type of quality control is known as peer review. Sometimes the programmer sends the source code listings of the newly created module and its project documentation to another programmer with the request to read the code and provide notations for it. This procedure is also called an expert assessment. Programmers also share debugging information with each other in order to eliminate the most difficult-to-find errors. Participation in such a peculiar community to exchange information about errors is also considered an expert assessment. Although these informal actions can greatly contribute to correcting many errors, there are many errors / bugs / defects that go unnoticed, mainly due to the lack of completeness and thoroughness in the peer review. Testing specialists can use expert assessments during test case design, test data generation and evaluation of test results.

Mobile app testing companies are involved in running tests on mobile applications to find out what causes them to exhibit incorrect behavior.

In order to improve the methods of expert assessments, formal critical analysis methods and formal testing methodologies have been developed as more complete and thorough means of finding, documenting and fixing errors. Critical analysis assumes that the author of the documentation or the source code of the software familiarizes his colleagues with their approach to using this component of the product. A group of colleagues discusses the algorithms / approaches proposed by the author, the interpretation of requirements or a documentation method, asking the author questions or asking for clarifications, until the whole group is satisfied with the proposed solutions. Testers can also use critical analysis during test planning, test case design, data generation and evaluation of test results.

The concept of testing was first defined by one famous computer scientist while working at IBM. Testing is defined as a form of peer review and has much in common with informal code review and critical analysis. Test processes begin with the submission by the author of the source code listing and design documentation for the module of a particular product to the project test manager.