Discussing Code Reviews with Tech Leads
code reviews, software development
I sat my two tech leads down last week and went over a draft of our new code review process. They were OK with the general approach and idea, but they did have two things to add:
- You’re going to present this to the team.
- We probably won’t need to do these after a little while since everyone will be on the same page.
On #1 I did plan on working up a short presentation to the team, but I understood they really wanted to make sure there was management support for it. Code reviews aren’t exactly popular. And #2 I certainly hope that we’ll have a lot fewer mandatory recommendations, but I think we’ll be adopting them as a regular practice. If the team wants to switch to say some light pairing or we run into other issues of course who knows. At the end of the day I think getting the team to adopt TDD is a bigger goal than having regular code reviews. In some ways it’s really just meant to be a supporting practice.
Ed Gibbs @ October 30, 2005
What is your current practice? Does code get checked in by a single developer with no other developers ever looking at it?
In a nutshell, yes, code is checked in with no peer review. These are typically business applications with fairly well defined functionality so the risk isn’t as high as if it were a complex product. And this is why we’re changing our process.
I look forward to hearing how they go. My company instituted code reviews recently, but generally the extent of the reviews is “Does it work?”
I’d like to hear how/if constructive criticism is making the code better.