It's always been my opinion that code reviews are a very nice-to-have, but not more than that. The real value in proposing changes for review comes from the automated testing that can be performed at that stage. I think we'd be better served overall by shoring up and expanding our automated testing rather than spending time discussing and implementing non-technical process.
The main benefits of code reviews are catching large-scale design errors and spreading code knowledge. You can't really have the former until you already have the latter - if only one person really understands an area, nobody else will be able to catch design errors in that area. That's clearly a risky place to be, but IMHO at least it's not a problem that can be solved through rules. It requires a cultural shift from the team to make spreading code knowledge an actual priority, rather than someone everyone wants but nobody has time or interest to achieve. If we as a team don't have the drive to do that, then we should accept that about ourselves and move on. You'll always do best spending time on enhancing the strengths of a team, not fighting against the things they don't excel at. I'm also not trying to make any kind of value judgment here - software development is always about tradeoffs and compromise, risk versus goals. Any time taken to shift focus towards spreading code knowledge will by necessity pull from other parts of the development process, and the upshot may well not be an overall improvement in functionality or quality. Ceej aka Chris Hillery On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 10:49 PM, Till Westmann <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > today a few of us had a discussion about how we could make the reviewing > process moving along a little smoother. The goal is to increase the > likeliness > that the reviews and review comments get addressed reasonably quickly. To > do > that, the proposal is to > a) try to keep ourselves to some time limit up to which a reviewer or > author > responds to a review or a comment and to > a) regularly report via e-mail about open reviews and how long they have > been > open (Ian already has filed an issue to automate this [1]). > Of course one is not always able to spend the time to do a thorough review > [2] > / respond fully to comments, but in this case we should aim to let the > other > participants know within the time limit that the task is not feasible so > that > they adapt their plan accordingly. > The first proposal for the time limit would be 72h (which is taken from the > minimal time that a [VOTE] stays open to allow people in all different > locations and timezones to vote). > Another goal would be to abandon reviews, if nobody seems to be working on > them > for a while (and we’d need to find out what "a while" could be). > > Thoughts on this? > A good idea or too much process? > Is the time limit reasonable? > Please let us know what you think (ideally more than a +1 or a -1 ...) > > Cheers, > Till > > [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ASTERIXDB-1745 > [2] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ASTERIXDB/Code+Reviews >
