Re: PL/SQL Code Reviews

redrobot5050_at_gmail.com wrote:

>

Code reviews tend to be a negative experience for developers. Not that I mind grabbing the old lead pipe and beating up developers over bad code in production.. but that seldom achieves the desired result.

Why are code reviews needed? I believe that question should first be asked. And then solutions must be looked at. In my experience the prime one is education. Get the developers' skills to a common and acceptable level. Get them to understand why it makes sense to follow the development standards set, show them the goalposts so they know what to aim for.

Of course, not that easy. What did work and worked well is when we did an outsource job many years ago using external sub-contractors for development. The first week for a new group of contractors was dedicated to training. I gave them the specs for a minor subsystem (already developed) that was about 3 man days worth of development. The week (5md's) was spend by the new contractors developing that subsystem in a dev environment. This was the ideal environment for them to get their feet wet, make mistakes, and learn from it.

After that week, they were fully productive and turned out quality code. I reviewed their code as part of my Q&A duties, but it was minor and nothing like these full blown (and often confrontational) reviews one tends to get. And 90+% of the code was really quality stuff. Sure, the 1st 5md's was training at our expense. But we got a lot more back on that investment in the end.

We had the occassion where a contractor kind of failed this 1st week's training. We terminated their contracts immediately.

Obviously this situation we had was unique in that it did not have to deal with existing "entrenched" developers that are use to doing things in a specific "non-standard" (hackish?) way. Still.. I believe that this type of approach to training and evolving skill levels is far more beneficial than code reviews.

--
Billy