Where have all the reviewers gone? [LWN.net]

Where have all the reviewers gone?

Posted Sep 14, 2006 7:51 UTC (Thu) by eskild (subscriber, #1556)
Parent article: Where have all the reviewers gone?

I would like to add that in the commercial world, things are often no better; in fact, they're often worse. I've held jobs in several companies now, from small to medium to huge -- and while there's often been a desire for review, I've never seen it enacted except for one case where problems were so bad that it was unavoidable.

In other words: Good intentions, but it just doesn't happen unless brownish stuff hits the fan.

Far more common is the kind of "review" that takes place when someone else has to look at the code during normal maintenance. But that typically only touches the narrow area where modifications are originally required; and it is late in the lifecycle of the code, so it's very hard to really "do something about it" if there are problems.

One thing underlying it is, IMHO, that the quality of software is usually determined from external observation: "Does it work?" -- where the question really ought to be: "Does it work, and is it built well?"

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Where have all the reviewers gone?

Posted Sep 14, 2006 8:41 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

in the commercial world, things are often no better

In my experience there is peer review in the commercial world, altough not as much as it should be. In the previous two projects I've worked the version control system was set up so every modification to the code was sent via e-mail to the interested parties (e.g. senior developers), who had the oppurtunity to check it. Also the project management pressured the developers to hold formal code reviews for new functionality.

Bye,NAR

Proprietary side of the coin

Posted Sep 14, 2006 12:43 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]

I remember my dear friend Zoon did that in our company, so he and I would see what our less experienced colleagues were checking in.

The problem was then to make them understand why a particular change was bad, and should be corrected, and with time pressure on the project, even the managers were just biting the bullet in the end, and the crap stayed there accumulating.

Mind you, we both left the company quickly after that!