On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 7:42 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
That's one of the reasons actually assigning time for it should be helpful: currently we have zero staff dedicated full-time to getting code ready for deployment and deployed. We have several staff & contractors with it on their list of duties, but no actual requirement that it get done on a regular basis. With no regular short-term review & deployment schedule (even for fixes), we all find other things to do and get out of the habit.
It would be nice to have someone doing this full-time yes, but even without that, I agree that having regular short-term schedules helps enforcing discipline.
However, I guess some people are afraid that assigning someone to this full-time will waste their other skills and possibly make them unhappy, and I kind of agree. However, dedicating one FTE spread among multiple people should work too, as long as it's not more than, say, 3. I would quite like to be one of these people once I'm able to work full-time.
And let's not forget that a big part of what review does is to help develop the reviewee's coding skills! By pointing out things that need fixing and things to watch out for, we help all our coders become better coders. And by pushing review closer to the original code-writing, we'll make that feedback loop tighter & more effective.
Absolutely! Another thing that happens is that people's coding skills improve to the point where they can *review things themselves* . This is how we build our reviewer base: hold our existing devs to high standards, and wait for them to grow into it.
I'm saying this because what you say in the first paragraph can be (and at one point was) used as an argument to hire a "code reviewer", i.e. hire a new person specifically for code review. IMO this is doomed to fail because code review is pretty much the opposite of an entry-level position. We can train people to be reviewers, but only if they already have significant dev experience and have shown potential, not if we just grabbed them off the proverbial street and they're just getting their feet wet with MediaWiki.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)