Characterizing implicit information during peer review meetings

Disciplines like software engineering evolve over time by studying some practices and feeding back those results to improve the practice. The empirical approach presented in the paper is used to analyze the nature of the information shared during peer review meetings (PRMs) held in an industrial software engineering project. The results obtained show that although a PRM is categorized as a verification practice, it is also a golden opportunity for project personnel to share information about technical solutions, a decision´s rationale or quality guidelines. The contribution of PRMs is not restricted to the rapid detection of anomalies; they also provide the opportunity for project team members to share implicit information. PRM efficiency cannot solely be measured through an anomaly detection rate