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- Keep it professional. Don’t. Get. Personal.
- Don’t take it personal.
- Show your work early and often.
- Improve after receiving feedback.
- Repeat from step 1.
- Stack Overflow is down, and your developers suddenly aren’t as productive as usually 😜
- Slack is down, and communication is halted. Everyone freaks out, and no work gets done.
- Your hoster has problems with their energy and their emergency energy, and servers stop and reboot. You have to take care of this.
- all kinds of things…
Only two rules
There are only two hard rules when doing code review with your coworkers:
Remember that you are talking about letters and symbols in files. Nothing more and nothing less. You are doing this to improve the results, the software.
You are not your code!
Indentation as a Complexity Metric
If you want to measure the complexity of your software, there is a lot of software, tools and software-as-a-service offerings available. These options can seem daunting and have a lot of onboarding time (the time it takes you to understand how to use them and get meaningful results).
If none of these things work for you, don’t despair. There is a simple way to get a high-level view on the complexity of your software. And it’s language-agnostic. It doesn’t care whether you write CSS, Ruby, Java or something else.
Show your work
I wanted to add something to the topic from two days ago: Quality in the eyes of your users.
There is a thing I did not mention. A practice that could help you and your team achieve a higher quality of your products:
Interfaces
In computing, an interface is a shared boundary across which two or more separate components of a computer system exchange information. (Source: Wikipedia.org)
You develop a web application that has a frontend for the users and a backend for the business logic and the data persistence. (This is a simplification, bear with me for a second.) Your frontend accesses the data from the backend through an API that the backend provides. This is the first interface. It’s right there in its name Application Programming Interface. But let’s ignore that one for another second. How does your frontend consume the API? Did you wrap the calls to the API in its own class in the frontend?
Quality in the eyes of your users
I bet that most people reading this won’t have UAT or QA. So what could you do to still achieve quality in the eyes of your users?
Yours users will spend more time with your software, like it and recommend it more, when they are happy using it. If we’re honest it might even be enough to make them not dislike the software. There is so much crap software out there, that people use to get their job done, that the bar is pretty low.
Two views on quality
During the last months I wrote a lot about quality and how to develop high-quality software. These letters dealt with topics like linting your code, testing and documenting it. I also wrote about the different perspectives and motives that might exist in your team.
But there is one view that I omitted more or less: The external view of your customers. They expect to receive and use your software. They expect it to be without bugs and to fulfill the role they “hired it for”.
Fundamentals
Taking note
Today I want to share a small little idea with you. An idea that can have grave consequences if misregarded:
When you schedule a meeting with your team, also share with the team who is responsible for taking minutes/notes. One person has to be responsible for that.
Evolve
Since I strongly believe that you can only achieve high-quality work if you trust your teammates, I am trying something today. I trust you.
I will show you a skeleton in my closet.
Frustration
How to train for a marathon
Measure it
I believe in improving the quality of your software projects. If you want to improve something, you have to measure it first. That idea was introduced by Peter Drucker, the famous management book author.
Now if I ask you, what metrics you could measure about your code quality, would you have an answer?
Code quality & security audit
One metric
Let the computer help you with that comment
Time well spent
Don't build a five-star hotel
Risk list
Imagine you are doing a software project. It is mostly going like planned. Things happen. You anticipated them and prepared for them. But there are days when unexpected things happen:
Cyclomatic complexity
if/else) or branches in your code lead to higher complexity.