The article is about code inspections at Bell-Northern Research, a company that made telecom switches. The difference between modern code review and code inspection as described in the article make me a more suspicious of the claim that an hour of code review saves 33 hours of maintenance. Code inspection is much more exhaustive than the modern idea of code reviews on pull requests, where the expectations are usually unclear but generally call for a much lower amount of time put in by the reviewer. This is a very time-consuming process for several people. The article suggests a maximum pace of 150 lines of code inspected per hour. The article recommends inspectors attend overview meetings, read design docs, and generally put in some time to prepare for the code inspection. It’s an in-person group exercise where a team of at least three people (moderator, one or more inspectors, and the code author) go through a section of code line by line, paraphrasing what every line should do. of the article describes code inspection.
I also noticed the source is about code inspection which is pretty different from the modern form of code review. Blog posts are great (like this one, hopefully?), but someone writing an article in a journal isn’t a stamp of absolute truth. It’s the equivalent of a blog post from 1991.
The first thing that jumped out is that the source is not a peer reviewed scientific study. Weird, the stranger disappeared as suddenly as they arrived! Oh well, let’s dig in to the article and see what it says. The article is behind a paywall, but oh my gosh, a stranger just bumped in to me and in the confusion this link was knocked out of their stylish briefcase and fell on the ground in front of me. “Experience with Inspection in Ultralarge-Scale Developments,” IEEE Software, Vol. Thankfully, the author cited a source: Russell, Glen W. I decided to dig in to understand where this number came from. Software engineering is a fuzzy field and absolutes and exact numbers are not often found in the research. I mistrusted the exactness, certainty, and magnitude. A while ago I read a post that included the following quote:Įach hour spent on code review saves 33 hours of maintenance.
0 kommentar(er)
