Are Good Code Reviewers Also Good at Design Review?

Software review is a necessity activity to build high reliability software in software development. In this paper, we experimentally analyze the difference in performance between two types of (checklist based) software reviews: design review and code review. If good code reviewers were also good at design review, then we should assign good code reviewers to the design review too. If not, that means these two reviews require different types of expertise. In our experiment, with ten review participants, we examined two hypotheses each related to the defect detection ratio and the required time to find a defect. As a result, we found that there was no correlation between two reviews, i.e. good code reviewers were not necessarily the good design reviewers. This suggests the need of a completely different training program for each review.