Sep
3
WRITTEN BY:
David Cummins
Thursday, 3 September 2009
Most developers agree that reviewing code is an important part of (hopefully) reducing the number of bugs introduced into the system. However, the challenge is keeping your team productive whilst maintaining a code review schedule that gets enough eyes across the complete code-base.
Conventional wisdom is that quality control requires many and frequent design and code review meetings between technical leads and the development team. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you are on the other side of the fence) developers love meetings as much as the proverbial hole in the head.
You see, meetings kill developer productivity. A single meeting in the middle of the day has the potential to ruin an afternoon of happy development time.
Whenever a meeting is scheduled with a member of the development team, the developer has to change the way they think in order to focus on the meeting at hand. Developers don’t write code in hour blocks—and it’s not realistic to expect them to.
And for the technical lead, there is the logistics of getting all parties to attend the meeting and the time required to prepare for the review in the first place.
These difficulties can be alleviated by using collaborative tools to coordinate the review outcomes with participants.
Collaborative tools, such as wikis, divorce the need of holding physical meetings by allowing participants to review and annotate code when they have time to focus it. Team members can schedule review sessions when it fits their timetable.
Using these tools has added benefit in terms of being able to integrate with source control repositories. In this way, the reviewer is always sure that they are looking at the most up-to-date version of the code. Code reviews can be added as a dependency into release schedules so that only reviewed modules make it into the released product.
What’s more, review tasks can be added to standard developer task-allocation tools and review results can be easily integrated into team sites, wikis and issue tracking tools.
So, improve productivity and schedule less meetings by using collaboration tools to manage your code review process. It’ll keep your developers happy too!