Formal Review Process
Problem: Code and design inspections are not happening often enough to be effective, or the inspections are not rigorous enough to be effective.
Context/Forces:
- You are doing code and/or design reviews
- You may or may not have FormalStandards
- There is no clear idea of what to inspect and how to review designs and code
- Some developers don't "get away from coding" unless they are forced
- Some things are being reviewed, and some aren't
Solution: Institute a formal review process. Document and enforce how designs and/or code is to be reviewed.
(I have even seen employee performance scores affected by their adherence to a code standard, which was enforced by the review process)
Resulting Context: Code and/or design reviews are being done according to known guidelines for everything produced by a development team.
Related Patterns: See
CodeReviewPatterns.
I've read (and firmly believe) that
CodeReviews are near-worthless without good
CodingConventions and that it is impossible to maintain
CodingConventions without
CodeReviews. --
JeremyCromwell
A lot of Smalltalk groups maintain
CodingConventions without formal code reviews. The code gets read a lot by everyone on the team, but not in a
review. So, I don't think the second half of this statement is true.
What is a
FormalReviewProcess? This pattern says "have one", but it
doesn't say what one is. --
RalphJohnson
I think for most people
FormalReviewProcess = "It's written down". Sort of like ISO9000. --
JasonYip
See
FormalReviewTechniques