Effective Reviews and walkthroughs

At the beginning of this chapter, I talked about reviews being the easiest but weakest form of model verification. This shouldn’t be construed to mean that I don’t believe reviews have value. Properly applied, reviews are a very useful adjunct to other, more rigorous forms of verification. Reviews can contribute to both syntactic (“compliance in form”) and syntactic (“compliance in meaning”) verification. They are relatively easy to perform and can provide input that is otherwise difficult to obtain.

Syntactic reviews, performed by quality assurance personnel, demonstrate compliance of the model to the project modeling guidelines, including the organization of the model, the presence of required elements and views, the structuring of those views, compliance with naming conventions, and more.

Semantic reviews are performed by Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). Some of the questions such reviews can address...