What is Review?

Review is a process of checking and verifying documentation to watch if it was correctly written. In other words, this is a procedure responsible for looking after the correctness of documentation writing and for document’s agreement with special technical writing standards.

As creating project documentation is considered one of the essential parts of the entire project working process, its quality assurance is undeniably significant. For this purpose, businesses always make primary checking of documentation, also known as the review process. Now let’s discover what the review is and why it is so important.

What is the Review Process?

As it was said, a review is responsible for ensuring documentation quality. Nevertheless, it is different from quality assurance (QA) that tests project requirements and documentation. The main difference is that process of quality assurance executed by a QA team is a far more complicated procedure that sometimes involves a lot of time and resources. QA engineers test different aspects of technical and non-technical documentation through deep research.

On the other hand, the process of reviewing requires less time and resources as it only checks the logic of narration and the textual content itself. So, this process is simple and represents only superficial testing. Despite that, documentation review has a special procedure and people responsible for it.

The Process of Reviewing

The simplest explanation of this type of assurance is that after the part of a document has been written, it is immediately given to a responsible person who reads it and leaves comments.

That may be comments explaining or editing different aspects of documentation, from technical correctness to grammar and punctuation of the sentences.

Commonly, this work is done by a member of the team – reviewer – who has specific knowledge and education in technical or writing areas. Sometimes, the reviewer's responsibilities may be given to a team lead or a project manager, but this is less effective as these people have their work to do.

After the superficial testing reviewer makes all the necessary comments or edits something themselves; in the end, they send the article back to the writer for correction. Sometimes, the writers may check and update the text, but it’s also not very effective from the point of reasonable assurance.