Things Everyone Should Do: Code Review

Things Everyone Should Do: Code Review
scientopia.org

The easiest method is just passing around diffs, though more sophisticated tools exist. Review Board is one I know of off-hand, though my experience with it was not overly great. I've personally just tossed together a decent diff-viewer with a couple different view modes to account for when, say, a quick patch is sufficient vs. when you really need to see the code in context.

But this is only one solution of many. I actually have seen solutions that involve source control systems, but I've always found them to be too hacky even for me.

If your source control makes branching/merging painful enough that it's going to get in your way to do it on a regular basis you might want something different, but that seems like an argument for better source control rather than a need for clever reviewing strategies.

Then I went and worked for a startup video game company, the programming team was myself and one of my friends from college. We decided not to do code reviews because we were building a game engine from scratch and the churn was going to be way too high to keep up with.

You can claim that code reviews are fast, but when you're generating a couple hundred new lines of code a day that really builds up. Especially when each person is committing 5-10 times a day.

What we decided to do instead is go down to the coffee shop below our office every day and just talk about what we were working on, the problems we had run into, and what should be worked on next. As a result, we still had a lot of knowledge sharing going on without having to look at every single line of code going into the codebase.

Having a general idea of how the systems are being built and put together is _much much_ more important than going over every line of code looking for bugs.

My point, is that the knowledge sharing is what's important. We could have done code reviews, but it was actually a lot easier to just talk to each other for an hour or so a day away from the computers about the state of the project. As a hidden bonus, we also got fresh perspective on implementation ideas before any work was done, which I imagine saved countless hours.

This sort of thing is probably less feasible at larger companies, so maybe code reviews are the best way to share knowledge there, but if you're under 3-4 people I'd definitely try this approach instead.