Why?

An on-site project review is an excellent way to get a quick assessment of a project's current status and some real-world, pragmatic recommendations regarding aspects that can be improved.

A software architecture review is an good way to get a quick assessment of the software's current architectural status and some real-world, pragmatic recommendations regarding aspects that can be improved.

Off-site workproduct/artifact reviews are an excellent and relatively inexpensive strategy to help prevent a project from taking those "wrong turns" that can be so costly. This is especially true when the project is venturing into new territory ... such as using some new development methods.

What can we do?

We can perform on-site or off-site exploratory, introductory, one-off and/or on-going reviews on various project plans and workproducts:

• Requirements documents (e.g., Use Cases and Supplementary Specifications)
• Analysis-level Class Diagrams
• Sequence Diagrams
• Design-level Class Diagrams
• Software Architecture Documents
• Project-level Development Plans
• Project-level Transition Plans (e.g., transitioning to RUP and/or OOAD or parts thereof)
• Others

In addition, if you have a project that is stumbling, we can perform an on-site, overall project review.

What happens during an off-site artifact review?

Normally, the process is as follows:

• You supply the artifacts to be reviewed
• We perform the review (see below)
• We communicate the results of the review
• You, and maybe your team, digest the review
• We might have some questions and answers about the review
• We might discuss what, if anything, this means going forward - some of the common options being:
• a follow-on conference call after the team has digested the review
• some follow-on on-site training and/or mentoring
• further reviews or other participation based upon the recommendations

Typically, the actual artifact review involves the following:

• we're sent some documents (usually in Word format) or models
• we perform the review
• make changes to documents (using Word's change tracking) or models
• add comments to documents (using Word's comment feature) or models
• we formulate and write recommendations

If an artifact is "way off," then we'll just review/edit/comment on one or two examples of each major issue and return the document or model for rework, before proceeding with a more complete review.

I'm interested, what's the next step?

Learn more about the process or simply contact us to let us know what you're currently thinking or what additional information you'd like and you'll get a reply, normally via email the same working day.