While I may not be the most active Twitter-er in the world, the one thing I have noticed is that there is an awful lot of activity around the term “code review” lately. Since code reviews have become a widely used practice, I thought I would share one of my experiences about code reviews with you, from a product manager perspective. In my first Agile team, many years ago, it was tabled (in our retrospective meeting after a couple of Sprints) that code reviews should be added to our definition of “Done”. Let’s just say
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Most code reviews are done in-person, 60% according to data from a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Klocwork. So how do you accommodate remote sites, out-of-office employees or off-shore development shops? Most software developer teams will face some form of remote development challenge during their careers or product cycles. As demonstrated from the data above, the breakdown of remote need is as follows: 76% use some form of outsourcing, 64% have some developers located outside of the main campus, 40% of reviews are conducted with remote participants. You can’t let development come to a grinding halt simply because a critical
Read More »As readers know, we’ve been talking about code reviews pretty regularly here and elsewhere over the past few months. To continue that discussion, here’s a question we run into often: are in-person code reviews as the primary way to communicate, by definition a bad thing? Here’s some more data from the Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Klocwork that shows the majority of respondents still conduct in-person reviews… elsewhere in the survey only 36% of respondents indicated that they worked on a centralized team with everyone in one location. So that means, if 60% still conduct
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It’s often taken as read that developers think code reviews are just a pain in the behind. Maybe that sentiment is true when a developer’s sitting amongst his/her peers and getting interrogated on the quality of their code, but some of the data from a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Klocwork seems to contradict that a bit. The survey asked software development professionals a whole bunch of questions related to code reviews (some of which we’ve referenced before) and here are two interesting data points that suggest developers see real benefits from code reviews. So
Read More »Part IV – Joy is in the eye of the beholder In preceding posts on this topic, I’ve outlined the continuing shift from in-person, physical interactions as being the defining notion of both social and business contexts, towards virtual interactions and marketplaces, and the fact that in all aspects except the most personal the latter can fulfill everything expected of the former. But what does all this have to do with engendering a vibrant and successful code review practice within a development organization? On the face of it, nothing much. Code review, you could determine,
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The importance of code reviews has already been well covered by lots of smart people like Jack Ganssle and Jason Cohen. Recently, the subject has become more important around here, so we want to offer our take. In particular, we’re looking at the best way(s) to incorporate code reviews into an overall software verification strategy and how automated tools (such as static analysis, no shock there) can help unleash the benefits of peer code review. More on that angle another time, first the bigger picture. Klocwork recently commissioned a survey conducted by Forrester research on
Read More »Part III – Joy is All Around Us When you think of a social activity, what do you think of? Perhaps a rave? Or maybe a quiet bridge foursome is more your style? Or even a Matrix-style meet-and-greet complete with latex and contortionists? Ahem… Or maybe you’ve finally let go of this old-world requirement to actually be in the presence of an individual to enjoy a social encounter with them, and instead have embraced the reality of the 21st century, that society and social interactions no longer require physical presence, and instead surround us every
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Part II – Joy is the word… OK, so Grease is really the word, but it didn’t fit my theme, gimme a break… Anyway, back on topic, since Joy of code review – part one of this series was published last year we’ve seen our new code review product in action in a variety of customer and prospect situations, and much like the eponymous hair product in the musical mentioned above, what we thought of as an interesting twist on an existing paradigm has turned into a bit of a barn burner. I refer, in
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Part I – Ode to Joy Since the launch of the seminal “Joy” work which hopefully doesn’t need mention here, we’ve seen everything from The Joy of Cooking to The Joy of Not Working (my personal favorite!), and so further to that deeply mined vein of authoritative works we bring you the necessarily over burdened… Joy of Code Review! Joy, you say? Let me count the ways… I implement a task, using what I consider to be best practice patterns and guidelines; I slave over this, my creation, and when it’s done, I stand back
Read More »Jason certainly hits the nail on the head. Automation, specifically using static analysis, is key and it should be tightly integrated with your code review. Although we need to be careful where we label source code analysis. Static source code analysis certainly can find those low level issues such as labeling your local variables correctly, but it goes beyond simple code style issues. Where static source code analysis can really help is with the deep inter-procedural context that it can provide. For example, during a code review you go through some code with a number
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