What is Structured Walkthrough and it’s Benefits

In this article, you’ll learn about Structured Walkthrough, Benefits of Structured Walkthrough and more.

Ever wondered how software engineers catch mistakes in their work? Structured walkthroughs offer a solution. This collaborative technique involves a team of peers systematically reviewing a software project’s technical aspects. Their primary goal? To identify errors and improve the overall quality of the software. While solutions aren’t discussed during the walkthrough, pinpointing problems allows the creator to address them later, leading to a more polished final product.

What is Structured Walkthrough

A structured walkthrough, a static testing technique performed in an organised manner between a group of peers to review and discuss the technical aspects of the software development process. The main objective of a structured walkthrough is to find defects in order to improve the quality of the product.

Benefits of Structured Walkthrough

Benefits of Structured Walkthrough are as follows:

• Saves time and money as defects are found and rectified very early in the lifecycle.
• This provides value-added comments from reviewers with different technical backgrounds and experience.
• It notifies the project management team about the progress of the development process.
• It creates awareness about different development or maintenance methodologies which can provide a professional growth to participants.

Structured Walkthrough Participants

Participants of Structured Walkthrough are as follows

• Author – The Author of the document under review.
• Presenter – The presenter usually develops the agenda for the walkthrough and presents the output being reviewed.
• Moderator – The moderator facilitates the walkthrough session, ensures the walkthrough agenda is followed, and encourages all the reviewers to participate.
• Reviewers – The reviewers evaluate the document under test to determine if it is technically accurate.
• Scribe – The scribe is the recorder of the structured walkthrough outcomes who records the issues identified and any other technical comments, suggestions, and unresolved questions.

Real life Example of Structured Walkthrough

Imagine you’re a restaurant manager and you want to improve the takeout ordering process. Here’s how a structured walkthrough could play out with it’s different phases,

Preparation:

• You gather your team: servers, cooks, and someone familiar with the online ordering system.
• The goal: identify any issues that might be causing delays or frustration for takeout customers.
• The server who takes online orders walks the team through the current process, step-by-step.

Walkthrough:

1. Online Ordering: The server explains how customers place orders online, highlighting any confusing elements on the website or app.
2. Order Receiving: The cooks discuss how they receive online orders and if there’s a clear distinction from in-house orders, which might lead to delays.
3. Order Fulfillment: Everyone walks through how the order gets prepared, packaged, and communicated to the customer for pickup.

Identifying Issues:

• Maybe the online menu isn’t up-to-date and there are missing items.
• Perhaps the kitchen doesn’t receive a notification for online orders, leading to delays.
• There could be confusion about who handles takeout payments (online vs. in-house).

Outcome:

• After the walkthrough, the team has a clear picture of the problems.
• They don’t brainstorm solutions during the walkthrough itself, but they know what areas need improvement.
• Following the discussion, you, the manager, can assign tasks to address the issues. This might involve updating the online menu, setting up an alert system for online orders, or clarifying payment procedures.

This is just a simple example, but it demonstrates how a structured walkthrough can be used outside of software development to identify and address problems in any kind of process.

Conclusion

In today’s world, the need for perfect and great quality is extraordinary. People all over the globe demand various types of products that have exceptional performance and functionality as well as fulfil all their needs. Similarly, in the software industry too, consumers and the end users demand software systems and applications that are of state-of-the-art quality and provide expected or desired results.

However, to accomplish such demands, software engineers have to go to great lengths while developing software systems and applications.Throughout the software development process, they use several techniques and methods of software development and constantly perform test for quality assurance and to detect any discrepancies in the system. Structured Walkthrough is a type of Quality Assurance technique, which is used by software testers for error detection.