Hi Belen,
I think there are more advantages than disadvantages as a QA review leads to a higher quality requirements document. One of the potential challenges or disadvantages might be level of detail – I’ve found that sometimes a QA review will be looking for a level of detail that might need to come from a lower level document, such as a design document provided by a developer. So without proper expectations in place, QA can drive too much detail into the requirements doc.

What has your experience been?

Hi Bob,
That’s a great point. There can indeed be some rigor put to peer reviews and when working with mentees I often ask them to let me know where they think they need the most help and how I can provide feedback that’s going to help them the most. Of course, I have my own internal checklists I use too so that I’m catching things they might not be thinking of.

In our peer reviews, we were all relatively new to the rigor of requirements analysis and so we discovered those kinds of guidelines as we discussed each others’ feedback and realized how differently we were all doing relatively similar work. It was really quite an enlightening process.

A peer review may also be carried out by:
a subject matter expert to ensure that it makes sense, and by a completely independent person, who will ask a number of questions that in the asking and answering will question any internal assumptions made.