Re: XP and Pair Programming

Responding to Phlip...

While I agree that there is no free lunch and reviewer effort is significant, especially in aggregate, I can't agree with the 1:1 metric per reviewer. It is much easier to critique something with intellectual content that already exists than it is to create it. I've reviewed specs, models, and code that took days or weeks to create with a few hours effort on my part.


I'm very good at pairing and I suck at that kind of reviewing. 

Pair programming is just a form of interactive review.


Does that say I'm incompetent to review? or that reviewing is a diversity-challenged technique?

There is no doubt that reviewing other people's work is a learned skill. But the techniques are no different than those employed in pair programming to identify errors, bad coding practices, blind spots, and whatnot. If you can do it in a pair situation you should be able to do it in any review situation.


I drift off. I get bored. And I won't delay reviewing by asking the most important question: This code is nice _statically_, but what's its _dynamic_ profile? Show me how to change it along its OCP boundaries? What new tests would I write? Could I simplify it, to bring it closer to its ideal?

Then such reviewing also denies my opportunities to improve its bug resistance. This opens the question "where did those weeks go?"

Actually finding bugs is best done by having multiple screens, even when coverage overlaps. IOW, a review is just a form of test. Each view of the application represents a different screen for review purposes so the more views there are besides the code itself, the more reliable the application will tend to be. Those views also provide the different perspectives that you seek.


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