Notes:
The purpose of reviewing the design of a package is to ensure that the package designer has addressed the purpose of the package, and that the designer of the classes within the package understands what is needed.
The design documentation was produced using GDPro.
There were two things that developers liked about these reviews:
The design got sorted out (instead of having to invent a way through the issues, or to track down a designer that had moved on to something else)
Sequence diagrams gave them a good feel for the way in which a methods was going to be used
I'd classify the meetings we held as "reviews" rather than as "inspections" because there was no formal checking of the design against the requirements. (I viewed this as low risk as the system architect was present, and the problem domain well understood by those present.)
Note:
The company standard design tool had previously been TogetherJ – but it didn't fit with our patterns of use. In my opinion there are serious problems with all of the UML tools I have encountered: GDPro, Rose, TogetherJ (and some time ago Select) – so don't take this as a recommendation!
GDPro has been rebadged by its new owner as: Embarcadero Describe:
http://www.embarcadero.com/products/describe/dedatasheet.asp