2010/8/13 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com>om>:
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)