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 threadhallway_monitorMar 17
You are exactly correct. As to why it’s unpopular, I believe it’s just that no one has given it a fair try. Once you have done it for at least 20 hours a week for a few weeks you will understand that typing is not and has never been the bottleneck in programming. If you have not tried it then you cannot have an opinion.
Show threadpalmoteaMar 17

> You are exactly correct. As to why it’s unpopular, I believe it’s just that no one has given it a fair try. Once you have done it for at least 20 hours a week for a few weeks you will understand that typing is not and has never been the bottleneck in programming. If you have not tried it then you cannot have an opinion.

I haven't tried pair programming except in very ad-hoc situations, but doing it all the time sounds utterly exhausting. You're taking programming, then layering on top of it a level of constant social interaction over it, and removing the autonomy to just zone out a bit when you need to (to manage stress).

Basically, it sounds like turning programming into an all-day meeting.

So I think it's probably unpopular because most software engineers don't have the personalty to enjoy or even tolerate that environment.

Show threadgenthree

Yeah, I’d have a mental breakdown within weeks if I had to pair more than an hour a day, max (even that much, consistently, would probably harm my quality of life quite a bit—a little every now and then is no big deal, though). No exaggeration, it’d break me in ways that’d take a while to fix.

[edit] I’m not even anti-social, but the feeling of being watched while working is extremely draining. An hour of that is like four hours without it.

Mar 17 at 4:56pmWeb