On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 7:42 PM, Brion Vibber <brion(a)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)