Groupware Support for Asynchronous Document Review

Abstract

The formal document review process has basically remained unchanged since it was first introduced by Fagan in 1976. Central to this process is the review meeting, which all participants attend. However, recent empirical work has indicated that this meeting is not necessarily effective. A review model and a prototype co-operative work tool, InspectA, that dispense totally with the need for reviewers to hold face-to-face meetings, are presented. They replace the meeting with further individual reviews combined with communication between reviewers facilitated by electronic mail. The model and tool are both compared with other existing work in the area of meetingless review.