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How to Deal with an Insufferable Code Reviewer

Time for another installment of reader question Monday.  Today, I’m going to answer a short and sweet question about how to deal with an “irksome” code reviewer.  It’s both simple, and fairly open ended, making it a good candidate for a blog post.

How do you deal with peer code review and irksome coworkers? Any trick?

Okay, first things first.  This could cover a lot of situations.

Theoretically, someone could be writing extremely problematic code and finding coworkers “irksome” simply for pointing that out.  And, at the complete other end of the spectrum, the code may be fine but a toxic culture creates endless nitpicking.

In environments like this, the code review becomes an adversarial activity, as much about political games as about code quality.

So you must introspect and also think in terms of your goals.  What is it that’s irking you, exactly, and what is the desired outcome?

I’ll frame the post roughly in terms of goals, and my advice for achieving them.  Really, that’s the only way to do it, since code review processes vary so widely from team to team.

A Bit of Perspective on Code Reviews and Code Reviewers

Before going into any advice, let’s consider the subject of code review itself.  There are two conceptual levels at play.

Obvious Level: A Practice with Demonstrable Benefit

A well-conducted code review process helps with code quality and it helps developers learn.  In his book Code Complete, Steve McConnell cited a study that found “formal code inspection” to be the most effective defect prevention method.

This put it ahead of even automated unit tests in the study.

But, beyond that, code review has important human ramifications as well.  People learn and share knowledge through this process.

And they use it to prevent the kind of defects that result in frustration for the team: rework, embarrassment and even a need to come in on weekends.  People with a stake in the codebase get emotionally invested.

Subtle Level: Small Kings in Small Kingdoms

There’s also another, more subtle element at play, however.

I talk extensively about these terms in my book, Developer Hegemony, but you can read a brief primer here.  Software developers (to my endless irritation) are pragmatists (line-level laborers) with almost no actual influence in the corporate world.

When you participate in the so-called “technical track,” you typically never have people reporting to you, earning only developmental titles that include things like “senior,” “tech lead,” and “architect.”

So often, the only simulacrum developers get of actual organizational power comes during interviews and code reviews.  Decent human beings handle this well, looking to mentor and teach.

But there are a lot of less-than-decent human beings out there, who relish these opportunities to wield what little power they have.  The phrase, “a little man with a little power” comes to mind.

An angry code reviewer

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Software Grows Too Quickly for Manual Review Only

Editorial note: I originally wrote this post for the SubMain blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, have a look at CodeIt.Right, which can help you with automated code reviews.

How many development shops do you know that complain about having too much time on their hands?  Man, if only we had more to do.  Then we wouldn’t feel bored between completing the perfect design and shipping to production … said no software shop, ever.  Software proliferates far too quickly for that attitude ever to take root.

This happens in all sorts of ways.  Commonly, the business or the market exerts pressure to ship.  When you fall behind, your competitors step in.  Other times, you have the careers and reputations of managers, directors, and executives on the line.  They’ve promised something to someone and they rely on the team to deliver.  Or perhaps the software developers apply this drive and pressure themselves.  They get into a rhythm and want to deliver new features and capabilities at a frantic pace.

Whatever the exact mechanism, software tends to balloon outward at a breakneck pace.  And then quality scrambles to keep up.

Software Grows via Predictable Mechanisms

While the motivation for growth may remain nebulous, the mechanisms for that growth do not.  Let’s take a look at how a codebase accumulates change.  I’ll order these by pace, if you will.

  • Pure maintenance mode, in SDLC parlance.
  • Feature addition to existing products.
  • Major development initiatives going as planned.
  • Crunches (death marches).
  • Copy/paste programming.
  • Code generation.

Of course, you could offer variants on these themes, and they do not have mutual exclusivity.  But nevertheless, the idea remains.  Loosely speaking, you add code sparingly to legacy codebases in support mode.  And then the pace increases until you get so fast that you literally write programs to write your programs.

The Quality Conundrum

Now, think of this in another way.  As you go through the list above, consider what quality control measures tend to look like.  Specifically, they tend to vary inversely with the speed.

Even in a legacy codebase, fixes tend to involve a good bit of testing for fear of breaking production customers.  We treat things in production carefully.  But during major or greenfield projects, we might let that slip a little, in the throes of productivity.  Don’t worry — we’ll totally do it later.

But during a death march?  Pff.  Forget it.  When you slog along like that, tons of defects in production qualifies as a good problem to have.  Hey, you’re in production!

And it gets even worse with the last two items on my bulleted list.  I’ve observed that the sorts of shops and devs that value copy/paste programming don’t tend to worry a lot about verification and quality.  Does it compile?  Ship it.  And by the time you get to code generation, the problem becomes simply daunting.  You’ll assume that the tool knows what it’s doing and move on to other things.

As we go faster, we tend to spare fewer thoughts for quality.  Usually this happens because of time pressure.  So ironically, when software grows the fastest, we tend to check it the least.

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Are You Aggressively Trying to Automate Code Review?

Editorial note: I originally wrote this post for the SubMain blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, have a look at their automated analysis and documentation tooling.

Before I talk in detail about trying to automate code review, do a mental exercise.  Close your eyes and picture the epitome of a soul-crushing code review.

You probably sit in a stuffy conference room with several other people.  With your IDE open and laptop plugged into the projector via VGA cable, you begin.  Or, rather, they begin.  After all, your shop does code review more like thesis defense than collaboration.  So the other participants commence grilling you about your code as if it oozed your incompetence from every line.

This likely goes on for hours.  No nit remains unpicked, however trivial.  You’ve even taken to keeping a spreadsheet full of things to check ahead of code reviews so as not to make the same mistake twice.  That spreadsheet now has hundreds of lines.  And some of those lines directly contradict one another.

When the criticism-a-thon ends, you feel tired, depressed, and hungry.  But, looking on the bright side, you realize that this is the furthest you’ll ever be from the next code review.

It probably sounds like I speak from experience because I do.  I’ve seen this play out in software development shops and even written a blog post about it in the past.  But let’s look past the depressing human element of this and understand how it proves bad for business.

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CodeIt.Right Rules, Explained Part 5

Editorial note: I originally wrote this post for the SubMain blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  You can also read a lot more, both on that blog and in their documentation, about CodeIt.Right’s analysis rules.

Today, I’ll do another installment of the CodeIt.Right Rules, Explained series.  This is post number five in the series.  And, as always, I’ll start off by citing my two personal rules about static analysis guidance, along with the explanation for them.

  • Never implement a suggested fix without knowing what makes it a fix.
  • Never ignore a suggested fix without understanding what makes it a fix.

It may seem as though I’m playing rhetorical games here.  After all, I could simply say, “learn the reasoning behind all suggested fixes.”  But I want to underscore the decision you face when confronted with static analysis feedback.  In all cases, you must actively choose to ignore the feedback or address it.  And for both options, you need to understand the logic behind the suggestion.

In that spirit, I’m going to offer up explanations for three more CodeIt.Right rules today.

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Spring Cleaning Your Code Review

Editorial note: I originally wrote this post for the SubMain blog.  You can check out the original here, at their site.  While you’re there, have a look at the automated code review tool, CodeIt.Right.  

Many of us have a natural tendency to let little things pile up.  This gives rise to the notion of the so-called spring cleaning.  The weather turns warm and going outside becomes reasonable, so we take the opportunity to do some kind of deep cleaning.

Of course, this may not apply to you.  Perhaps you keep your house impeccable at all times, or maybe you simply have a cleaning service.  But I’ll bet that, in some part of your life or another, you put little things off until they become bigger things.  Your cruft may not involve dusty shelves and pockets of house clutter, but it probably exists somewhere.

Maybe it exists in your professional life in some capacity.  Perhaps you have a string of half written blog posts or your inbox has more than a thousand messages.  And, if you examine things honestly, you almost certainly have some item that has been skulking around your to-do list for months.  Somewhere, we all have items that could use some tidying, cognitive or physical.

With that in mind, I’d like to talk about your code review process.  Have you been executing it like clockwork for months or years?  Perhaps it has become too much like clockwork.  Turn a critical eye to it, and you might realize elements of it have become stale or superfluous.  So let’s take a look at how you can apply a spring cleaning to your code review process.

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