2010/8/13 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:
they supposed to review code? I'd think it would be much more sound to ask a couple of existing employees to pitch in instead, spending part of their time reviewing and part of it coding. I can think of a couple of people who are qualified enough. It doesn't make a lot of sense to have someone who only reviews and doesn't code, unless they've already done so much coding that they're very familiar with the codebase and coding conventions anyway.
I second this. The only way to become good at reviewing MediaWiki code is to write MediaWiki code for at least a year. I had been a dev for 3 years by the time I felt comfortable reviewing code, but then I hadn't been doing it full time. Someone working full time and being coached by experienced reviewers should be able to get up to speed in less than a year, IMO. This would still be quite a long time, though, so hiring people specifically for code review should be understood in that context.
However, the fact that it takes so long to get a good grip on reviewing code suggests that reviewing code is just something that senior developers do, and that newly hired developers will be able to review code a few years from now. If we have our existing senior developers do more code review, educate all of our developers about code review better, and just hire more developers to initially cover the void of senior devs doing less coding and more review and later to join the reviewers, I believe we'll have a much more sustainable and sane setup than we would get by hiring people specifically for review and having them focus on review from day 1.
I also wonder how the review process could be more transparent, since it's already completely public and open for anyone to join in (and plenty of random non-developers do join in).
I would also like to hear specific suggestions here. I think there are things that could be done to improve our code review process in terms of making sure code gets reviewed in a timely fashion and by the right person. (I have some ideas about that just occurred to me today, so I'll take the time to think about them and hash them out more while I'm on vacation, and maybe post them next week.) However, it's not clear to me how transparency could be improved. All the data is already made available, all that could be improved AFAICT is making it easier to obtain.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)