It is said, “It can be a peer, rather than a customer, find a defect.”
This one-liner statement intensively endorses that peer reviewing is an obligatory process in the life cycle of documentation. Therefore, it is recommended to have regular and an effective peer review process in place that is recognized as a powerful system to improve upon certain technical aspects or sentence-level issues in the documentation.
To achieve a good end result, make the peer reviewing process a priority and a habit. It is decisive to understand that this process is an important step to be completed before a document is published or project is complete. Peer reviews must contain constructive criticism and the goal is to improve the team’s documentation or project-specific metrics and not to deride someone’s writing or performance.
Preferably, a qualified professional or a member of the team who is principally accountable for the project must perform the peer review. The work on the document must be peer reviewed from a professional standpoint and view point of the reader/user.
Follow the points given here in the peer review process:
- Be candid and unbiased, yet polite while offering criticism. Offer criticism with aplomb in your comments; after all quality matters here. Do not make personal attacks anywhere in the comments. This can only cause differences among the participants in the review process and it does not indicate authors/writers clearly as to how to improvise their writing.
- As you point out the weaknesses or errors in a piece of writing, it is appreciative if you can also indicate the positives. Bring up facts to the writers’ notice as to why something is particularly correct or why not.
- Substantiate your suggestions with a rationale and propose the writer the right direction as to how they might improve the work for future releases.
- Ask questions so that the writers have to clarify their points or find ways to improve or rectify the information or sentence structure.
- Always understand that time is a constraint (time taken for your review and for the writers’ revision). So, focus on the most important area where the document could be improved.
- Finally, provide a memo (or a reviewer’s report) that summarizes the findings and include a note on scope for improvement.
- Writers, after receiving the feedback in the form of comments and/or recommendations, should respond to the reviewer by acknowledging the changes made or actions taken against each comment.
- If there are reasons for not following certain recommendation or changes, let the peer reviewers know the reason so that that they can avoid commenting on certain style or known issues in future.
To summarize, it is important to perceive the peer reviewing process more in terms of collaboration or teamwork and perhaps mentoring thereby making helpful suggestions for improving the documentation.
