[kjksf]

(I wrote that blog post).

What I was trying to say is: there's dogma about tests and code reviews.

At Google you would get fired for suggesting skipping code review.

Even at smaller Silicon Valley companies (smaller == less than 10 devs) it's unthinkable to not do code reviews. I haven't worked outside SV so it might be different.

That's the dogma.

My point is that maybe we should apply a bit of common sense on top of that.

I'm not saying Google should stop doing code reviews - the cost (to Google) of google search breaking is so high that you do 100x more than just code reviews.

But maybe those smaller companies don't need to dogmatically review the checkin for a documentation fix.

[VHRanger]

The problem with tests is the TDD dogma, which wastes time and makes code harder to change (because even reasonable changes break a bunch of tests).

There's a good rule of testing top level behaviors described in this talk [1]

For code reviews, it's about knowledge handoff. No one disputes you can write great code alone. The problem is that singular geniuses writing functional but unmaintainable code only they understand and then getting hit by a bus or changing jobs is a real issue.

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ05e7EMOLM

[RNAlfons]

I work in Health IT here in Germany and for the past 3 years we've been "testing" those "smaller companies" for different parts of our business.

It's a mess. We've been paying them serious money for a product. We've never been warned that their product isn't finished yet or that we're the beta testers for the product they'll sell to other clients. Or that we have to invest our own personal and their time to fix their problems and talk to their useless support.

This has become a pattern and I'm done with it. We are slowly moving back to older and larger companies who actually do their work properly before they roll out products and updates.

[noAnswer]

What "older and larger" company do you have in mind? What ever you do, never choose CGM! They wouldn't even be able to spell "test" if their live depended on it! Nothing new ever works, like at all. Everything older needs at least one or two server restarts a day!

[RNAlfons]

medavis for example.

I know CGM from medico...their KIS is a nightmare. We have to communicate with it in hospitals. What an ugly monster and somehow no hospital IT is able to admin it properly.

[cstork12]

Wow, didn't expect to see medavis mentioned here on HN. I'm currently writing Data Warehouse software (and more) interfacing with their RIS. However, I don't really know what their testing practices are.

Which of their products are you considering?

[RNAlfons]

Right now we switched back from DoctoLib to booking4med but we're using all kinds of RIS modules here.

What Data Warehouse software do you write for RIS? Maybe I can use it :D

...and yeah Radiology communities are rare. I'm still looking for one...if I have time.

[cstork12]

Interesting! From where I'm sitting DoctoLib seems to win over the market.

The DWH software writes snapshots of db_direct into a temporal DB (implemented in Postgres using multiranges) and then uses dbt to transform the data into usable tables. Right now, I use Power BI for visualisation and reporting.

[wolverine876]

> My point is that maybe we should apply a bit of common sense on top of that.

...

> But maybe those smaller companies don't need to dogmatically review the checkin for a documentation fix.

It's not dogma, it's just the necessities of large groups of people working together. A small organization can use common sense, a function that scales up to (20? 50?). 10,000 people can't operate on common sense; they need another function: rules.