The folks over at SmartBear software have written a nice little book entitled The Best Kept Secrets of Code Reviews. It's free if you go over to their webpage and ask for it (you have to fill out a registration form, and it takes a few weeks to arrive, but they havent spammed me at all since I registered with them a few months ago).
This is a pretty good book and it is VERY pragmatic! It is applicable to Agile development too! [You don't have to do Pair-Programming to be Agile! Pairing is part of XP, which is one particular agile method -- several other agile methods do not require it.]
SmartBear also has a pretty neat suite of tools that look to me like they would be REALLY USEFUL for an organization trying to streamline some of its otherwise heavyweight processes for peer-reviews and related quality metrics:
And "No!" they did not ask me to blog or say anything nice about them or their products! I'm simply coming from the perspective of someone in a large organization who has witnessed a lot of homegrown and heavyweight processes and tools for these kinds of things, and don't see too many commercial tools addressing the peer-review aspect of development and trying to make it lighter-weight and better-integrated with version-control and the rest of SCM.
The have some other nice resources too:
Looks like a lot of "good stuff" to me!!!
In an earlier blog-entry reviewing the book Code Craft, I mentioned the classic paper by Peter Miller entitled "Recursive Make Considered Harmful" ...
Anyway, I recently ran across a bunch of webpages that examined or revisited the issue. I thought several of them were worth sharing, so here they are:
Nostarch Press recently published the book Code Craft: The Practice of Writing Excellent Code by Pete Goodelife.
I have to say the book looks pretty "excellent" itself. It may even become a new classic, replacing the old classic "Writing Solid Code" by Steve MacGuire. And if Steve McConnell hadn't recently updated his even more classic "Code Complete" with a 2nd edition, I might even put Code Craft on a par with that. It's that good!
It's not just about programming & design either. Like Code Complete it covers pretty much all of "software construction." It has some good stuff about build, integration, test, source-control, and more.
About my only pet peeve is that in the "Answers and Discussion" section it talks about recursive make versus inclusive make schemes. It has a pretty good discussion, but I couldn't find any reference to the classic paper by Peter Miller entitled "Recursive Make Considered Harmful". That kind of bothered me because I don't think there's any good excuse for it. It also made me wonder if there were some other places I didn't know about where appropriate references/citations were missed or neglected. (It's not severe enough to make me recommend the book any less highly though!)
I would probably put Code Craft on the "REQUIRED READING" list for any relatively new professional programmer, and have them read it just before before reading Code Complete.
