onion2kMar 17

But you can’t just not review things!

Actually you can. If you shift the reviews far to the left, and call them code design sessions instead, and you raise problems on dailys, and you pair programme through the gnarly bits, then 90% of what people think a review should find goes away. The expectation that you'll discover bugs and architecture and design problems doesn't exist if you've already agreed with the team what you're going to build. The remain 10% of things like var naming, whitespace, and patterns can be checked with a linter instead of a person. If you can get the team to that level you can stop doing code reviews.

You also need to build a team that you can trust to write the code you agreed you'd write, but if your reviews are there to check someone has done their job well enough then you have bigger problems.

Show threadalkonautMar 17

This falls for the famous "hours of planning can save minutes of coding". Architecture can't (all) be planned out on a whiteboard, it's the response to the difficulty you only realize as you try to implement.

If you can agree what to build and how to build it and then it turns out that actually is a working plan - then you are better than me. That hasn't happened in 20 years of software development. Most of what's planned falls down within the first few hours of implementation.

Iterative architecture meetings will be necessary. But that falls into the pit of weekly meeting.

Show threadsodapopcanMar 17
Pair programming 100% of also works. It's unfortunately widely unpopular, but it works.
Show threadjakevoytko
I also think we're going to see a resurgence of either pair programming, or the buddy system where both engineers take responsibility for the prompting and review and each commit has 2 authors. I actually wrote a post on this subject on my blog yesterday, so I'm happy to see other people saying it too. I've worked on 2-engineer projects recently and it's been way smoother than larger projects. It's just so obvious that asynchronous review cycles are way too slow nowadays, and we're DDoSing our project leaders who have to take responsibility for engineering outcomes.
Mar 17 at 1:38pmWeb
Show threadyonaguskaMar 17
For anything complicated or wide in scope, we've found it much more productive to just hop on a call and pair.
Show threadplayer1234Mar 17
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