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by asuffield
3694 days ago
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(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.) I distrust me by default, and you should too. Humans cannot write correct code, and the way to keep high code quality is to maximise our ability to fix the errors that result from having humans involved. I don't want me submitting any code that hasn't been looked at by another person. While I do (almost every day) manage to write some CLs that get approved without comments, I definitely have many CLs every day where somebody will say "This is confusing" or "There's no test for this part" or "Here's a better idea that I had". If your team members are engaging in passive-aggressive abuse then you should find new ones, not try to do your job without interacting with them. A person of the same experience level as me will routinely find things that I missed, just because they didn't spend two hours writing the code and are taking a fresh look at it. The same thing is true of a person more junior than me, if we can make them not be shy and write comments like "I don't understand what this does, therefore it is too confusing". No reviewer guarantees code quality, because nothing guarantees code quality, but my experience is consistently that 1 reviewer is a massive improvement over 0 reviewers, with marginal improvement based on reviewer experience. The true cost of not doing code review is that your code will be harder to maintain in future, giving continual costs for its entire lifespan. The only code I consider to have a cost/benefit ratio that makes it worth skipping the review phase is code that I don't intend to keep for very long. |
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This kind of breeds a dilemma: If humans don't know how to write correct code, why are we trusting them to verify code correctness? :)
No matter how many times I run jslint, I always get the same result, however if I would show the same code to 20 programmers, I'm pretty sure I would get a lot of different results.
> If your team members are engaging in passive-aggressive abuse then you should find new ones, not try to do your job without interacting with them.
If your friend looks at your code, (s)he'll find a lot less issues than your rival. We software engineers are not emotionless objective beings.
My issue is that I have seen few issues that could have been caught in time by code reviews with the cost of the code review being less than the cost of just fixing the problem. Code reviewing every change is continuos effort, that might cost more than having a few quirks and fixing it.
I do understand some projects do require every kind of verification process you can throw at it, like software that controls nuclear power plants, however not everyone is building that kind of software.