The Mindset

Today, I’m going to start with the bottom line: we still have a long way to go.
No, there’s nothing new about it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably know all about the misconceptions and myths the software industry suffers from. But today wasn’t any ordinary day, because today I had the […]

It’s time for yet another insight regarding reviews. You probably know this is one of my favorite topics, so this should come as no surprise.
In my previous posts on reviews, I described different types of reviews, or more accurately different motivations for reviews.
In Are Your Code Reviews Effective? I described reviews designed merely for […]

In my previous post I questioned the popularity of peer reviews in the real-world. I claimed that there might be a good reason that most organizations are not practicing systematic peer reviews: the nature of peer reviews causes too much overhead and context switching, which makes them ineffective for the long run.
But what about […]

When I first wrote about professional reviews as a mentoring platform, some people responded with the question: what’s wrong with peer reviews anyway? Why do we need a person specializing in code and design reviews instead of assigning this task to peer developers within the development team?
As I explained in previous posts (and as you […]

Whenever I meet someone who is performing systematic code reviews, I am thrilled. Code reviews are close to my heart, and, believe me, meeting such a person is not a common event as one might think. So whenever I do meet such a person, I just want to know everything about how he handles his […]

My Are Your Code Reviews Effective? post raised some fine questions. The most popular question regarding Professional Reviews argued that reviews conducted by a professional mentor will not provide the benefit of knowledge sharing that other reviewing methods seem to provide.
Knowledge sharing among team members is an important goal. Having only a single developer who knows […]

In a recent article James Shore describes Software Design as context sensitive. He rightfully claims that every practice and guideline should be questioned and adapted to the specific context we are currently working in.
This is more than true. Design is context sensitive. Context sensitivity, however, is not unique to the design domain. Many other software development activities […]

For many people in the software industry the term Code Reviews is automatically interpreted as an activity done internally within a development team. Some see it as an activity done by peers – reviewing each other’s code. Others see it as the job of the development team leader to review his team members’ code.
Is […]

There are two questions I am being asked quite often. The first question is how to structure code such that it will be easy to read and manipulate; the second question is how to read code effectively (in a review or as part of a maintenance task). Clearly, these two questions are related. In fact, […]

A couple of days ago I was thinking about a design problem. I was working on designing a fictional product for an upcoming design workshop I was creating. Since I usually try to create a notion of a real-world problem in my workshops, I had come up with the requirements for this fictional product, and […]