Peer Review

Why

Colleagues and experts can help position and improve your work, certainly if it needs to be reused by them. When safety is involved, peer reviews are essential to prevent unsafe system design.

How

Organise a group of representative experts and have them look at your work in a structured way. Peer reviews can have formal and less formal forms, but their quality depends on two factors: the right experts and the right instructions for looking at and reporting on your work.

Ingredients

• Colleagues or other (external) experts.

• A reviewing procedure.

• Reviewing and reporting guidelines.

• Time to process the results.

Practice

Peer review is applied in many forms in practice, both formal and informal. Examples are electrical or mechanical design reviews in physical systems engineering, or code reviews in software engineering. Peer review forms part of the quality control process.