It’s Time for Your Review
April 15, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 3)
Good writing is an art—one I freely admit I’m still hoping to master even after having earned a living at it for more than 25 years. I’ll write something, read it aloud, make a few changes, read it again, then virtually ball it up for a toss into my recycle bin.
When I get to a point where I think I have something good, I’ll ask one of the other editors or writers nearby to take a look at it, and let me know what they think of the effort. They’ll often show me how I could have eliminated an entire paragraph of explanation with a more elegant turn of phrase higher up in the piece, or that an argument I’m making in a column is disjointed, and that paragraphs need to be rearranged to make the case more clearly or strongly. Or, they simply say, this section here just makes no sense.
Grammar and spelling? Not an issue. Like many of us, I do most of my writing in Microsoft Word, which has great automated tools built in to prevent me from juxtaposing letters in a word, or from mangling my subject/verb agreement. It saves me plenty, believe you me.
But the automated checkers cannot inform me that one well-written sentence could take the place of an entire, clumsily worded paragraph. They can’t tell me that, after scanning the piece from top to bottom, the point I started out to make isn’t the one I delivered at the end.
The same is true for writing software.
There are great automated coding tools that go far beyond auto-completion. They’ll let you know if you’re violating a policy, or if all functional specifications work as desired. But even the best testing tools can’t tell you, for a very simple example, if your code matches up with the documentation, or does what the requirement intended.
And so, at the SD West Conference & Expo held in mid-March in Santa Clara, more than one software company was advocating for the widespread adoption of peer code reviews.
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