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Code reviews serve several purposes including quality and spreading knowledge. Robert Glass suggests that "RI1. Rigorous reviews commonly remove up to 90 perce
by ColinDabritz 15y ago
Code reviews serve several purposes including quality and spreading knowledge.
Robert Glass suggests that "RI1. Rigorous reviews commonly remove up to 90 percent of errors from a software product before the first test case is run." ( http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035 http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035 )
He has several related points and extensive discussion in his book 'Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering'.
One of his key points is that code reviews (he calls them inspections) are the closest thing we have to a silver bullet in a field that actually has very few of them.
Kudos to putting quality first!
- regularfry 15y agoThat's an interesting finding, in that it clearly predates any concept of a red-green-refactor cycle. The idea of getting code reviewed before running tests just seems utterly alien to me.
- edabobojr 15y agoYou're using the wrong frame of reference here. The first test referenced here is the first test run by a separate qa team.
- substack 15y agoThat seems like a massively inefficient way of doing things. Tests are very inexpensive since they can run without human intervention. Code review requires another human to sift through changes. If the automated tests pick something up first then the code reviewer wouldn't need to sink any time into a review in the first place.
- tomjen3 15y agoTests are less expensive to run than a codereview, but they take time to write, and rewrite, and rewrite (you software isn't perfect the first time).