Formal review generally provides various ways to improve quality, efficiency, and productivity of software development to simply recognize and solve their own issue and defects very early in software development process.
At present, there are several organizations that are conducting reviews in all major aspects of their work along with requirements, design, testing, maintenance, and implementation. More than three reviewers are required sometimes if reviewers from different fields are needed to simply obtain thorough evaluation of paper.
Roles and Responsibilities in Review :
The best formal review generally comes from well-organized team being guided by moderators or review leader that are highly trained. For review process, there are several roles and responsibilities being defined. Four different types of participants are required within review team. These participants are given below :
- Moderator :
Moderator, also known as review leader, generally leads review process. It simply co-ordinates with author and checks entry criteria for review. During review, they also lead discussion. - Author :
As the writer of ‘document under review’, author’s main goal must be to learn and know as much as possible with regard to improving and increasing quality of document. He/She is writer of documents under review and aims to gain maximum from review. They also help in improving document quality. - Scribe/Recorder :
As the name suggests, scribe or recorder simply has to record each and every defect and error that is found and any suggestions or feedback given in the meeting for improvement of process. Basically, author plays role of scribe, but it’s very good and advantageous to have another person to scribe so that author can only concentrate on review. - Reviewer :
Reviewers only have to check all of the defects and errors and then further improvements also in accordance to business specifications, standards, and domain knowledge. Reviewers must be technical, sometimes when review documents are very few than highly skilled reviewers are needed. - Manager :
Managers are basically included and involved in the reviews as he/she simply decides on execution of reviews, allocates time in project schedules, and generally identifies whether or not objectives of review project have been met. They decide execution of reviews. They also play role of reviewers sometimes.
Reviewer Responsibilities :
Reviewers have some responsibilities toward authors, readers, and editors.
- Responsibilities toward author :
- To provide constructively, written, and unbiased feedback in a given period of time.
- To indicate whether or not writing is clear, relevant, and rating work’s composition, originality, scientific accuracy.
- To avoid some personal criticism and comments.
- To maintain confidentiality of review process by not sharing and discussing anything with third parties, or also by disclosing information from the reviewed paper.
- Responsibilities toward readers :
- To ensure that the articles cite all of relevant work by other scientists.
- To simply ensure that all of methods and analyses are detailed adequately to allow the reader to judge the scientific merit of study design and also be capable to replicate the study.
- Responsibilities toward editors :
- To refrain i.e. to stop something from direct author contact.
- To provide a constructive and informative critique of the submitted work, that might include supplementary material being provided to the journal by the author.
- To determine originality, scientific merit, and also scope of the work.
