Crappy code...
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Sadly, I agree with you.
Well, better to come to the conclusion before quitting the proverbial day job, eh? I was married for a few years to a QA goddess (10 years experience is diety status in that field). We talked about starting a QA company much like your idea of code reviews. Of course, with rare exceptions nobody in this business hires professional software testers. How silly of us to think that there would be a market for such a thing, right? Hold on, let me reboot and I'll finish this... Christopher Duncan Today's Corporate Battle Tactic Unite the Tribes: Ending Turf Wars for Career and Business Success The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World
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Well, better to come to the conclusion before quitting the proverbial day job, eh? I was married for a few years to a QA goddess (10 years experience is diety status in that field). We talked about starting a QA company much like your idea of code reviews. Of course, with rare exceptions nobody in this business hires professional software testers. How silly of us to think that there would be a market for such a thing, right? Hold on, let me reboot and I'll finish this... Christopher Duncan Today's Corporate Battle Tactic Unite the Tribes: Ending Turf Wars for Career and Business Success The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World
I had no desire to start a company. It's just one of those ideas that pops into your head and you know its a bad idea, but what the heck, ask on CP. On any given day I swing between being totally sick of SD/technology to being impressed by its flexibility, power and potential. To a large extend, SD is still much like the wild west. There are relatively few rules and even fewer people enforcing the rules.
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Matt Gullett wrote: I see lots of problems with this type of business, but I am interested to hear other CPians opinions. It's an interesting idea. Sadly, I think those developers who really need it wouldn't use it, as they (or their managers) wouldn't realise the merits. Those developers who do realise the merits are probably the ones who already have something similiar in place. Getting managers to pay for code-reviews would be very difficult, sometimes it is hard enough to get them to pay for licences for third party components - even though those components are reducing development time and costs. Not to mention the problem of developers who react badly to their co-workers reviewing their code, nevermind an outside party! Michael But you know when the truth is told, That you can get what you want or you can just get old, Your're going to kick off before you even get halfway through. When will you realise... Vienna waits for you? - "The Stranger," Billy Joel
I agree with you.
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I had no desire to start a company. It's just one of those ideas that pops into your head and you know its a bad idea, but what the heck, ask on CP. On any given day I swing between being totally sick of SD/technology to being impressed by its flexibility, power and potential. To a large extend, SD is still much like the wild west. There are relatively few rules and even fewer people enforcing the rules.
Yeah, I know what you mean about SD. When I'm coding, it's still fun. When I'm dealing with the industry, it ain't. Christopher Duncan Today's Corporate Battle Tactic Unite the Tribes: Ending Turf Wars for Career and Business Success The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World
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This is one of those infamous double edged swords. From a business standpoint, it most certainly makes sense to hire the more experienced programmers. They'll get the job done faster and cheaper. On the flip side, if no one hires the inexperienced programmer, how will he/she ever BECOME experienced? Every experienced programmer was once inexperienced, after all. Kyosa Jamie Nordmeyer - Cho Dan Portland, Oregon, USA
The cost of hiring experienced programmers is a massive factor in my experience. Us old dogs know that experienece is worth every penny, but it isn't always easy to convince those responsible for hiring.
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I could see it working if it was implemented properly and focused on function rather than form. If someone starts telling me where to put my curlyque brackets, I think I might see a problem.
My neighbours think I am crazy - but they don't know that I have a trampoline. All they see my head bobbing up and down over the fence every five seconds
he he. My boss used to be religious about braces, spaces, tab stops, etc. It was even rumoured that he used to go through peoples code late at night and reformat it! Imagine THAT surprise as you sip your first coffee of the day! Thankfully he has chilled!
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he he. My boss used to be religious about braces, spaces, tab stops, etc. It was even rumoured that he used to go through peoples code late at night and reformat it! Imagine THAT surprise as you sip your first coffee of the day! Thankfully he has chilled!
Robert Edward Caldecott wrote: My boss used to be religious about braces, spaces, tab stops, etc. It was even rumoured that he used to go through peoples code late at night and reformat it! Imagine THAT surprise as you sip your first coffee of the day! I worked for someone who did that...but removed all the whitespace - the argument being that you could then get more code on screen :sigh:
Ian Darling "The different versions of the UN*X brand operating system are numbered in a logical sequence: 5, 6, 7, 2, 2.9, 3, 4.0, III, 4.1, V, 4.2, V.2, and 4.3" - Alan Filipski
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In my earlier years of programming, I wrote some pretty crappy code. Sadly, some of it actually made its way into production and is/can/will cause problems. As I have improved my skills as a programmer (I have a long way to go), I have realized just how important solid source code is and how critical an experienced programmer is to a project. Beging a standalone programmer introduces problems of its own and sometimes makes me feel uncomfortable about the "new territory" I enter with newly written source code. It seems to me that one of the long-term problems of the SD business is that many rookie programmers write lots and lots of code and much of the code is poorly written. Not because they are bad programmers or even poor leadership, but because they simply don't know the right way to do certain things. Examples include: initializing variables, proper way to initialize a class, use of exceptions -vs- return codes, etc. (And don't get me started on proper multi-threading techniques.) No offense to CP authors, but much of the code I have downloaded from here suffers from many common problems such as failure to initialize variables. (Please don't take offense to this statement as I am truly glad that people are willing to share their experience and efforts, and I am not an elitist, I make many common mistakes too.) It is often quite easy to determine from the article text how the code will look. More experienced programmers seem to do a better job of articulating what they are trying to do, why and how. I think this has something to do with how many programmers tend to seperate code from reality, and experienced programmers see code as a means to achieve reality. An understanding of reality (or what reality should be) must come first, code is just there to make it happen. So, I am curious. Does anybody think that a business that performs 3rd party code reviews would be useful? Would people pay for it? Obviously, this company would have to prove its credentials to the right people and would need to offer strict confidentiality. One of the functions this company could serve, in addition to code reviews, is concept documentation. I suspect that if an experienced programmer reads someones code and understands it, he/she mught be able to articulate the ultimate design objective in a way that makes sense, better than a rookie programmer might. (I know that in theory a programmer should be able to explain, in detail, what he is writing is supposed to do and support, but reality is often a f
Matt Gullett wrote: Does anybody think that a business that performs 3rd party code reviews would be useful? It's always useful. But you'll be perceived as a threat to inhouse developers and you won't be popular. You may get a contract though, as an instruments/consulting service to fire at inhouse developers. It happenned to one of the companies I worked for before. I guess it's better for team members to cross check each other's work. But they'll never have time for that - projects rarely complete on time. That's why we have Quality and Assurance specialists. They should look inside the box (Again, these guys aren't the most popular people in the company for obvious reasons) :) Norman Fung
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In my earlier years of programming, I wrote some pretty crappy code. Sadly, some of it actually made its way into production and is/can/will cause problems. As I have improved my skills as a programmer (I have a long way to go), I have realized just how important solid source code is and how critical an experienced programmer is to a project. Beging a standalone programmer introduces problems of its own and sometimes makes me feel uncomfortable about the "new territory" I enter with newly written source code. It seems to me that one of the long-term problems of the SD business is that many rookie programmers write lots and lots of code and much of the code is poorly written. Not because they are bad programmers or even poor leadership, but because they simply don't know the right way to do certain things. Examples include: initializing variables, proper way to initialize a class, use of exceptions -vs- return codes, etc. (And don't get me started on proper multi-threading techniques.) No offense to CP authors, but much of the code I have downloaded from here suffers from many common problems such as failure to initialize variables. (Please don't take offense to this statement as I am truly glad that people are willing to share their experience and efforts, and I am not an elitist, I make many common mistakes too.) It is often quite easy to determine from the article text how the code will look. More experienced programmers seem to do a better job of articulating what they are trying to do, why and how. I think this has something to do with how many programmers tend to seperate code from reality, and experienced programmers see code as a means to achieve reality. An understanding of reality (or what reality should be) must come first, code is just there to make it happen. So, I am curious. Does anybody think that a business that performs 3rd party code reviews would be useful? Would people pay for it? Obviously, this company would have to prove its credentials to the right people and would need to offer strict confidentiality. One of the functions this company could serve, in addition to code reviews, is concept documentation. I suspect that if an experienced programmer reads someones code and understands it, he/she mught be able to articulate the ultimate design objective in a way that makes sense, better than a rookie programmer might. (I know that in theory a programmer should be able to explain, in detail, what he is writing is supposed to do and support, but reality is often a f
I think it might be useful, IFF they do a proper job. It's better to hire in a consultant, IMO. An example of a company not apparently doing a proper job is Reasoning, Inc[^]. They were in the news last year after performing a 'code review' of various TCP/IP stacks and concluding that Linux had fewer defects. However, reading the reports (follow the Download link, you have to register) it appears that all they do is run
lintacross the codebase - they only pick up the most trivial errors, with no core understanding of the APIs. -
The cost of hiring experienced programmers is a massive factor in my experience. Us old dogs know that experienece is worth every penny, but it isn't always easy to convince those responsible for hiring.