Formal Checklist-Driven Reviews in Polarion: Faster, Auditable, Enforced
Polarion Partner Post by: Matthew Brtis – Polarion Business Development at Avionyx
Checklist-driven peer reviews with enforced independence, automated comment merging, and zero email or chat chaos. Easily customizable to your unique needs.
Every requirement, design description, model, and test procedure in a safety-critical or regulated system needs a formal review before it becomes certification evidence. DO-178C says so for airborne software. DO-254 says so for airborne electronic hardware. ISO 26262 says so for automotive. IEC 62304 says so for medical device software. ISO 9001 says so for manufacturing quality documentation. Whatever standard applies to your program, your auditor says so too.
And many teams still run that review over email, spreadsheets, or Teams/Slack.
The old ways of starting a review kick off with a message: “comments due Friday.” Five reviewers open the PDF. Two mark it up in Adobe. One prints it, scribbles in the margins, and scans it back in Tuesday afternoon. The document owner spends two days merging four different comment sets by hand, matching line numbers across versions, and chasing the one reviewer who never opened the attachment.
Three weeks later the auditor, DER, notified body, whoever signs off in your world, asks a simple question: which independent reviewer signed off on this, and which checklist item did every comment address? Nobody has that answer ready. Someone starts reconstructing the trail.
There’s a better way.
How a Review Actually Moves
A formal Polarion review moves through the workflow from end to end. Each stage is enforced in the tool itself, not left to a paper checklist on someone’s desk.
Kick Off & Assign Roles
Pick the work product. Pick the review type: Full, Partial, or Delta. Pick the checklist(s): Software or Airborne Electronic Hardware for avionics-specific reviews, or Common Engineering for mechanical, manufacturing, systems, or general program checklists. Assign reviewers to the roles the review requires. Roles are configurable based on one or more checklist type(s) for your organization. Here is an example of five, the exact number is set by you:
| Role | Independence Check |
| Systems | System-level correctness |
| Safety | Hazard and safety impact |
| Peer | Technical accuracy |
| Verification | Testability and coverage |
| Moderator | Process and completeness |
| QA | Compliance to plan |
Roles, checklists, and review type are all set in the same screen, so everyone knows what they’re signing up for before the review starts. This is also where gathering review compliance evidence begins.
Review Against the Checklists
Reviewers work independently or in a group session directly in Polarion, or an individual may download the PDF and mark it up offline if their travel schedule gets in the way. Regardless, every comment has to tie back to a specific checklist item ID, which keeps feedback specific and easy to act on.
Merge & Disposition
Upload the commented PDFs. Avionyx Reviews merges them automatically into a single consolidated master, no manual copy-paste across five reviewers’ markups, no reconciling who commented on which version. The author responds to every comment with a disposition, and the review can’t close until each one is addressed.
Enforce Independence, Close the Review
Before a review can be closed, guardrails built into the tool ensure process compliance. Required roles stay independent, and the record only closes once every assigned role has signed off. Work item status moves automatically: Draft -> In Validation -> Validated.
Generate the Evidence
One click produces a single PDF: review logistics, checklists, and source work product, combined into the record of truth, ready well before your auditor asks for it.
Integrated features better than Email and Chat Threads
- Traceability is structural. Every comment traces to a checklist item ID, not a marginal note on page 14.
- Independence is enforced, not trusted. The required roles must sign off before the record closes, and the workflow enforces it.
- Merging is automated. Commented PDFs consolidate into one master document on their own.
- The right review type is one click away. Full, Partial, or Delta, matched to the change that triggered it.
- The evidence package builds itself. Logistics, checklists, and source work product, one PDF, ready for the audit.
On an aerospace program, Joby Aviation’s own Design Quality Assurance lead called it “transformative” for document approval efficiency, and their DER (the FAA-designated reviewer, in aerospace terms) noted it saves developers real time and adds safeguards against costly downstream audit issues. The same enforcement and traceability hold up no matter who does the signing off on your program.
Come meet us at Polarion4U in Berlin, November 23-25. Avionyx will be presenting, and we’d love to talk with you to learn what formal reviews look like in your program.
See It for Yourself
Avionyx Reviews runs on the current Polarion release train and slots into an existing project without starting from scratch. Whatever standard your program answers to, the workflow, checklist, and evidence package are already built for it. The solution is fully customizable, so it can be tailored to your organization’s unique needs.
Request a walkthrough or see the full picture at avionyx.com/polarion-document-reviews.
Avionyx, a Joby Aviation company and certified Siemens Polarion Technology Partner since 2024, builds native Polarion extensions for regulated engineering: Reviews, Log Viewer, and Simple Traceability Diagrams, plus custom development for teams running DO-178C, ISO 26262, IEC 62304, and other safety and quality standards across aerospace, automotive, medical devices, rail, and manufacturing.
