Carl Quinn, a development manager at Google and a member of the Java Posse, mentioned that he spent about 50% of his time on code reviews. Google even has a special code review tool, Mondrian, developed by Guido van Rossum. The features are similar to Crucible.
Google’s warm embrace of lightweight code reviews sets a nice bar. We’ve heard for decades that code reviews or inspections are great for removing defects, keeping the code base maintainable, and mentoring. But…
- There’s no time, we have code to write.
- I have a healthy ego, I’m not comfortable with my peers giving me feedback.
- My code already works, it even passes those unit tests I wrote at the end.
- Code reviews are just about individual style, not worth the time.
- We’ll pair program then we don’t have to do code reviews. Oh, you mean I have to sit with another developer and share a machine? Let me think about those code reviews again.
- Code reviews, those aren’t Agile.
Can Google’s example win over more developers?