The aim of the research is to investigate the impact of software developers' performance in the software review process. A theoretical explicit and implicit input-process-output knowledge model was developed to analyse the important relationships among software developers' performance in software review process. A total of 1380 companies were invited to participate in this research and a total of 205 responses were used for final data analysis. The results suggest that software developers' experiences are the key driver for the software review performance. However, the use of explicit documents has no impact on software review performance. The new findings also suggest that the most critical factor in the software review process is ‘teamwork’, which can be affected by the characteristics of task, use of software documents and software developers' motivation.

The aim is to examine the important relationships between experience, task training and software review performance. One hundred and ninety-two volunteer university students were randomly assigned into 48 four-member groups. Subjects were required to detect defects from a design document. The main findings include (1) role experience has a positive effect on software review performance; (2) working experience in the software industry has a positive effect on software review performance; (3) task training has no significant effect on software review performance; (4) role experience has no significant effect on task training; (5) working experience in the software industry has a significant effect on task training.

The effects in the empirical study of different kinds of inputs on the software inspection process can be classified into explicit inputs and implicit inputs. Explicit inputs are the software artifacts to be inspected, the documentation and inspection aids used by the inspectors. Implicit inputs include inspectors' expertise, norms, beliefs and values.