re: Code Review Rights and Responsibilities

Shane MacLaughlin — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:48:35 GMT

Good Blog as always, Steve.

"Style issues - The reviewer wouldn't have done it that way. Fascinating."

Laughed at this initially, assuming the 'Fascinating' was sarcasm, simply because two programmers will rarely come up with the same solution for the same problem. This begs the question how many different ways do you want to solve a given problem in your application? While coding standards are well and good, they rarely deal with nitty gritty level of detail you hit in a code review, and can still fail to answer this question. I use code preview as well as code review, i.e. a discussion with how you intend to write the code prior to commencing coding, but still hit this problem on occasion.

I suppose you can always say the code meets requirements, and mark it and it's similar counterparts as candidates for a future refactor, but it seems less than satisfactory Any thoughts on this?

re: Code Review Rights and Responsibilities

Norman — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:12:21 GMT

Style might not be worth fighting for when time is pressing but if during a code review the reviewers suggest a different approach and the reviewee chooses to ignore this I see serious trouble in your project. You probably chose you reviewers based on their experience no? I have seen a lot of bad designs (I hate the word architecture) make it to production because some 'architect' wanna-be decided to do his or her own thing. Luckily these people usually get fired soon after.