6-hour and 4-hour Document Inspection processes

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We reserve the word Review for confrontation of a document (after all, all we do in development is writing documents!) with the heads (experience) of collegues. We use the word Inspection for the formal confrontation of a document with other documents.
Reviews we do once or several times to enhance the contents of a document. Inspections we preferably do once, to check the quality of the document.

Document Inspections according to the Gilb method (book ref. SP6) are greatly more productive than the review methods currently in use by most development organisations. Try it and experience the difference!
For introducing this Inspection process we provide the 6-hours Inspection process, as shown below. As soon as all team-members in a project have experienced this process once, you can switch to the 4-hours Inspection process. In the 4-hours process, the KickOff meeting is reduced to 30 minutes and the Logging meeting is reduced to 90 minutes. So, when you decide to routinely use Inspections in you project, every Inspection costs 4 hours times the number of participants. Now, who dares to maintain that his review process is more economical? We can prove that the Gilb Inspection process is far more economical!

The 6-hour Inspection process (for organisations starting using Inspections) is organised as follows:

Kick-off meeting: 2 hr
  • Why
  • How
  • What
Individual checking (by the author and some (2 to 5) colleagues) of the document: 2 hr
Logging meeting: 2 hr
  • 1 hr logging of issues found
  • 1/2 hr discussion about the Inspection process
  • 1/2 hr discussion about what should have been in the document in the first place

An introduction program to start this process is organised as follows:

1st day:
  • Entry and planning of Inspections of two different documents.
  • Combined kick-off meeting. Different author and checkers for either document!
    Note: during the kick-off meeting the Inspection process is explained (the why and how).
2nd day:
(Several days later. During this time the checkers do their individual checking. Leave them sufficient time!)
  • Two Logging meetings, one for each document.

Cost of this program:

  day 1 checking day 2
Authors 3 hr 2 hr 2 hr + repair of document
Checkers (each) 2 hr 2 hr 2 hr
Inspection leader (N.R. Malotaux) 1 day - 1 day

In these two days two documents are Inspected and some 6 to 12 engineers experience the Inspection process for real. You will be amazed about the enthusiasm  generated among the participants!

Questions: use the feedback form.