Does every formal peer review really need to take place? An industrial case study

Existing studies on formal peer reviews (FPR) are mostly based on design and code review practices observed from the open source software (OSS) community, and there is a lack of studies and evidence from proprietary, large scale software development in systems engineering settings. This study fills the gap by reporting an industrial case study on FPR practices in a safety-critical embedded system development organization. First, we follow the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) methodology to establish a set of metrics for understanding FPR practices and the resulting effectiveness. Second, we collect the metric data from 100 programs employing FPR practices on a variety of document types. Third, we analyze the data and derive answers to a set of questions defined in the GQM. The study contributes to more comprehensive understanding of FPR practices and effectiveness evaluation, and the findings reported here may serve as a basis for process improvements initiatives in similar settings.