Applied Software Project Management

Walkthroughs

A walkthrough is an informal way of presenting a technical document in a meeting. Unlike other kinds of reviews, the author runs the walkthrough: calling the meeting, inviting the reviewers, soliciting comments, and ensuring that everyone present understands the work product. It typically does not follow a rigid procedure; rather, the author presents the work product to the audience in a manner that makes sense. Many walkthroughs present the document using a slide presentation, where each section of a work product is shown using a set of slides. Work products that are commonly reviewed using a walkthrough include design specifications (see Chapter 7) and use cases (see Chapter 6).

Walkthroughs are used when the author of a work product needs to take into account the perspective of someone who does not have the technical expertise to review the document. For example, a requirements analyst must make sure that the use cases she builds will provide the functionality that the users need, but the user representatives may not have seen use cases before and would be overwhelmed by them. If these users are simply included as part of an inspection team, it is likely that they will read the document and, failing to find many defects, sit silently through the inspection meeting without contributing much. This is not their fault—their training is in the business of the organization, not in reading and understanding software engineering documents. This is where a walkthrough can ...