Recently, I had a conversation with a junior developer on my team. Let’s call him Alan. We were talking about a new notification feature that was going to be used to send reminder e-mails to potentially thousands of people if they had forgotten to enter certain data in the last month or so. Alan was confident that the code he’d written was correct. “I’ve tested it well.”, he said…
  • stuckgum@lemmy.ml
    14·
    6 months ago

    I wouldn’t do that, too much tunnel vision and biases. I just skim through and make sure everything makes sense. Especially naming and comments.

    • Kissaki@programming.devEnglish
      8·
      6 months ago

      I wouldn’t do that, too much tunnel vision and biases.

      Absolutely not. Self-reviews are very productive. I can confirm this from my own work and my colleagues, who also find it so.

      You’re of course free to vary the degree and depth of self-review, but tunnel vision and bias is definitely not overbearing and diminishing in those situations for us.

      Someone else will of course see more, what you may not see due to tunnel vision. But that’s besides the point.

      • stuckgum@lemmy.ml
        13·
        6 months ago

        Weird, never heard of anyone doing this. Aren’t your team self reviewing the code while writing it?

        • Rogue@feddit.uk
          8·
          6 months ago

          When you finish the final sentence of an essay or a report do you just submit it straight away? You don’t read it through?

        • Kissaki@programming.devEnglish
          5·
          6 months ago

          How do you self-review while writing? What do you mean by that?

          I see it as different phases of development, mindset, and focus. You inherently can’t be in multiple at the same time.

          1. Problem space and solution exploration - an iterative and at times experimental process to find and weigh solutions
          2. Cleanup and self-review - document your findings, decision-making, exclusions, and weighing, verify your solution/changeset makes sense and is complete (to intended scope)
          3. Reviews

          It makes no sense to be thorough during experimental and iterative exploration. That’d be wasted effort.

          After finding a solution, and writing it out, a self-review will make you take a systematic, verifying review mindset.

    • icesentry@lemmy.ca
      4·
      6 months ago

      I just skim through and make sure everything makes sense. Especially naming and comments.

      What do you think a self review is?

    • SatouKazuma
      1·
      6 months ago

      I think it makes sense, but only after logging out for the day and coming back to it a bit either the next day, or after a weekend in the case of code completion late Thursday or early Friday.