A design review is a milestone within a product development process whereby a design is evaluated against its requirements in order to verify the outcomes of previous activities and identify issues before committing to—and, if need be, to re-prioritise—further work.
The conduct of design reviews is compulsory as part of design controls, when developing products in certain regulated contexts such as medical devices.
By definition, a review must include persons who are external to the design team.
In order to evaluate a design against its requirements, a number of means may be considered, such as: Most formalised systems engineering processes recognise that the cost of correcting a fault increases as it progresses through the development process.
Additional effort spent in the early stages of development to discover and correct errors is therefore likely to be worthwhile.