Browsing articles tagged with " Ben Griswold"

“Optional” Software Development Practices Series — Code Review

Aug 31, 2012 // by Ben Griswold // Blog // No Comments

In the series opener, I wrote about “optional” software development practices like Test-Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI), data migrations, one-click deployment and code review which are fundamental to how we build software at Fairway, but are often touted as optional and embraced by a small percentage of development shops.

In this post, let’s dig into one of the “optional” heavy-hitters, code review.

There is any number of reasons why code isn’t reviewed at all shops – every reason from the presumed time/cost commitment being too high, to just not understanding the true benefit or how to get started, to a general aversion to change. My two favorite reasons include protecting developer morale (i.e. developers can’t handle having their work critiqued) and naively thinking there’s no need/value since developers are producing a good product already. Oh brother. Perhaps worse than avoidance, though, are the truly unfortunate cases where the fears of the skeptics are the reality, where teams preform code reviews poorly. Here, a lively roomful of peers nitpick and bash away on Johnny’s code or, quite the opposite, the review becomes a total snooze session. In either case, the review is probably scheduled too late in the project lifecycle so there’s no time for anything constructive to be done in response. There’s absolutely no value – just wasted time.

“Optional” Software Development Practices Series

Aug 20, 2012 // by Ben Griswold // Blog // No Comments

In a recent training session, Noah and I reviewed a handful of development practices including Test-Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI), data migrations, one-click deployment and code review.

What do these practices have in common?

Though these practices (amongst others) are fundamental to how we build software at Fairway, they are often touted as optional and embraced by a small percentage of development shops. Sure, many successful development teams have rolled out quality products without standing up a build server or managing their database scripts in a version control system, but these “optional” practices are such a boon to productivity and quality, and have such a positive influence on developer professional growth, the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) as a whole and the biggest winner, the customer, they should not be quickly dismissed.

In a series of future posts, I’ll dig into these “optional” software development practices, exploring the benefits of each and how to successfully introduce them into your SDLC.