Reviews and walk-through

Reviews and walkthroughs are typically peer group discussion activities - without much focus on fault identification and correction, as we have seen. They are usually without the statistical quality improvement, which is an essential part of Inspection. Walkthroughs are generally a training process, and focus on learning about a single document. Reviews focus more on consensus and buy-in to a particular document.

It may be wasteful to do walkthroughs or consensus reviews unless a document has successfully exited from Inspection. Otherwise you may be wasting people's time by giving them documents of unknown quality, which probably contain far too many opportunities for misunderstanding, learning the wrong thing and agreement about the wrong things.

Inspection is not an alternative to wal1cthroughs for training, or to reviews for consensus. In some cases it is a pre-requisite. The difference processes have different purposes. You cannot expect to remove faults effectively with walkthroughs, reviews or distribution of documents for comment. However, in other cases it may be wasteful to Inspect documents, which have not yet 'settled down' technically. Spending time searching for and removing faults in large chucks, which are later discarded, is not a good idea. In this case it may be better to aim for approximate consensus documents. The educational walkthrough could occur either before or after Inspection.