Effective Code Review

I’m an energetic, 20-something-year-old software developer from Ottawa, Canada. In 2011 I spoke at Microsoft MIX and at SenchaCon. Please consider my proposal for speaking at OSCON 2012!

I would like to propose a talk centered around code review. This is a common practice in the open-source community, but it’s very rare in commercial development. My talk would explain how we adopted code review after working on Wine, why this is one of the smartest things we have ever done as a company, and why/how others can do this as well.

Here are the major points and sub-points I propose to cover:

• Introduction
  • What we learned while working on Wine.
  • Why we chose to adopt code review.
• What are the benefits of code review?
  • Better code!
  • Broader understanding of the codebase.
  • Learning to be a better developer.
• Getting the most out of code review.
  • What does high-quality code look like?
  • What to look for, and how to find it.
  • What’s not important?
• How does this work in a geographically-dispersed team?
  • Asynchronous code review.
  • The reviewer-committer paradigm.
  • Taking advantage of timezone differences.
• Where source control fits in.
  • SVN vs Git
  • Benefits of related technologies (GitHub, Gerrit, etc)
• How to sell code review to others.
  • A fun story about how we convinced a small programming class at a local high school to use code review. (With fantastic results!)
  • How to sell code review to your boss.
• Conclusion
  • Why code review works for open source projects.
  • Why code review works for us, and for teenagers in high school.
  • Why code review can work for you.

Thank you for your consideration!