Many organisations use code reviews to help ensure a quality outcome. At the recent PowerShell Summit we ran a scripting competition – Iron Scripter. I’ve had a thought on how code reviews and Iron Scripter have something in common. Something that could lead to a better code review.
Iron Scripter involved the attendees splitting into 3 factions – each with its own philosophy:
Battle faction produce code that’s good enough to do the job then move onto the next problem.
Daybreak faction produce beautiful code that is easy to read and understand
Flawless faction produces code that “never” fails – it has all of the error handling and validation that you could wish for.
How does this help your code reviews?
Get people to adopt one of the above points of view (POV) either by choosing what comes naturally to them or by assigning roles. They then review the code from that POV:
Battle faction – does it get the job done
Daybreak faction – is it easy to understand and therefore maintain
Flawless faction – are errors handled
You can add other POV as desired and you don’t have to use the faction names. By getting people to review the code from differing POV you will have a better code review and therefore a better product.