[EnderMB]

I tried to make it as casual as possible. We got some nice coffee from the coffee shop down the road, brought it into a meeting room and spent about 45-60 mins going through the commit history on some of our projects.

We kinda lucked out with the idea. Some of the managers were adamant that all teams have a team meeting, with one of the "managers" sitting in, mainly because our technical manager had left and we were kinda self-governing in what we needed as developers. The regular meetings were a waste of time so we turned it into a code review meeting. Since it was a small company it was just developers and one of these managers, and the second the code talk started they couldn't wait to get out of the room.

Initially, I tried to steep the code review, but it worked best when we'd just go through our commit history, pull down some code and run it there and then from our "QA server" (a VM running off of one of the company file servers). I was very keen to make sure that it was a light-hearted meeting, so we'd demo the code, explain our thinking behind our implementation and just generally talk about whether we'd do things differently. Having a PHP guy involved was actually quite fun, because we were keen to treat it as if we'd learn something new by how "the other half" do things. We'd pick up on the differences between the code structure and talk about how we'd apply SOLID principles to that PHP code. One of the big breakthroughs in that meeting was getting this guy to adhere to the Single Responsibility principle in his code. Once the structure started to break down he'd be working extremely hard to better his code.

It'll need adjusting for your environment, for sure. This office was really stuffy, and aside from the odd manager and the MD many of the managers tried their hardest to be assholes. The process worked quite well, but I think the best part about it was that for an hour you could talk about code, have a nice coffee, and not be bitched at by managers that weren't even responsible for your area.

[asbestoshft]

That is a really great suggestion. I'm going to try that next time I find myself in this situation. Thanks for your time and input on this.