Can a Pmo Accelerate the Implementation Process Pdf From Peer Review

Some Active practitioners consider peer code review an unwelcome legacy that persists from the dark ages of waterfall development. As a result, they vehemently reject its inclusion in Active projects. This newspaper demonstrates both how code reviews reinforce the key tenets that underlie Agile development philosophies, and likewise how code reviews can be conducted in a manner that aligns perfectly with Agile processes.

What Makes Peer Code Review Agile?

Some Agile practitioners consider peer code review an unwelcome legacy that persists from the nighttime ages of waterfall development. As a result, they vehemently reject its inclusion in Active projects. This paper demonstrates both how code reviews reinforce the key tenets that underlie Active development philosophies, and too how code reviews tin exist conducted in a fashion that aligns perfectly with Active processes. The fundamental principles of Agile development are discussed at length on the Agile Manifesto spider web site. The essential Agile Manifesto tenets value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a programme

Although Active followers admit that the concepts on the right have value, they value the concepts on the left more. The premise is to adapt to changes in requirements, respond to user needs faster, streamline processes, decrease development iterations, and enable higher productivity. All this enhances business value by making development more transparent and getting software to the marketplace faster.

---

Upcoming Webinar : Agile Strategies for Edifice Codebase Consensus

---

So how can code review support Agile processes?

Consistently, research shows that lawmaking review produces software with fewer defects, which aligns with the emphasis on working software. What could be more interactive than software developers collaborating almost the code and making real-time improvements? As you'll larn in this paper, lawmaking review fully supports Agile tenets by promoting the development of working software, collaboration and interaction amongst teams, continuous attention to technical excellence and the ability to answer to change – all while maintaining a high level of quality.

Consider three, well-known Agile shops: Apple tree, Google, and Microsoft. Like most successful companies that adjure to beingness Agile, they enjoy high product adoption and loyal customers. Dissimilar Microsoft, Apple and Google are sticklers for code review, and their production quality reflects this added try. Apple tree in particular delivers major upgrades and fixes to the market at an impressive pace. Both companies closely tie code review to their development civilization; they "broil" lawmaking reviews into Agile sprints and iterations to place potential defects earlier in their cycles. At these companies, lawmaking is never "checked-in" before it is reviewed. And then why exercise so many software development teams resist adopting lawmaking review when industry titans attest to its success?

Moving Beyond the "Code Review" Stigma

Historically, the process for conducting code review has been pretty "anti-Agile." Every bit originally conceived by Michael Fagan in 1976, lawmaking inspections1 were a heavyweight code review process that led to an entire generation of software developers who believed that meetings were required to review code. Lots of meetings. Tedious meetings that emphasized processes and tools over individuals and interactions.

The effect is that today, heavyweight processes and meetings are regarded unfavorably by Agile devotees. This stigma tainted the entire concept of code review, causing code reviews to exist perceived equally an impediment by Agile project teams. Although this "guilt by association" has eroded over time, misconceptions still linger.

The biggest misconception is that yous need a coming together to practise code review. Although Fagan mandated meetings for his inspections, Lawrence Votta of AT&T Bell Labs was unconvinced that meetings were required. His study2 showed that when developers read the code to identify defects before the meeting, actually having the meeting only increased the total defects found by 4% (and consumed several hours of valuable time per meeting participant).

1M.E., Fagan (1976). "Design and code inspections to reduce errors in program development." IBM Systems Periodical xv(3):182–211. 2Lawrence G. Votta (1993)." Does every inspection need a coming together?" ACM SIGSoft Software Technology Notes, eighteen(v):107-114.

Recent studies confirm that code review can be effective without meetings. Jason Cohen, founder of SmartBear Software®, conducted a study at Cisco Systems® which demonstrated that a lightweight peer code review arroyo was not only as effective as a heavyweight code inspection process, only also more time-efficient by a factor of seven.

Yet even Active devotees who recognize that meetings are not required have misconceptions about code review. They say, "We just use the latest techniques hither; code review is from the past and provides no value," or "All the unit tests pass, and so why exercise we demand to exercise lawmaking reviews?" If you lot have abroad the meetings and the heavyweight process, but go out the interaction, responsiveness, and dedication to continuous improvement, and so code review is very much an Agile practice.

The Economics of Peer Lawmaking Review

While we can brand claims about the value of code reviews, we tin can illuminate these points with specific examples and quantitative prove. Note that all of the companies profiled on the following pages employed CodeCollaborator as the solution of choice.

Soft Corp Quick Inside View

Company Contour:

Develops technology-intensive systems for sensitive government projects and ruggedized, mission- critical mobile applications.

Pain:

Lack of standardized lawmaking review process. No obvious mode to enforce consistent code reviews across hundreds of programmers and multiple time zones. Existing lawmaking review tools delivered various levels of quality and functioning (Codestriker, custom-built tools and spreadsheets). Many teams conducted laborious and intensive code reviews that lasted for 1.five to 2 hours.

Goals:

• Carry reviews for 100% of the code for all projects.
• Make reviews more efficient in less fourth dimension.

Benefits:

• Ease of use and focus on efficiency promoted swift product adoption by the development team.
• Because developers actually use information technology, they are finding twice every bit many bugs in a quarter of the time.
• Integration with ClearCase (source code management) and ClearQuest (problem reporting and tracking) was easy.
• Setting up reviews was fast and easy.

Results:

Programmers tin can comport reviews at their own footstep, on their own schedule, sitting at their own desks. Reviews at present have near 20 minutes – a savings of most 75% of code review time.

Surroundings:

Platform: Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX | Source Control Management: Rational ClearCase | Development:Various

Cisco Quick Inside View

Visitor Profile:

Lawmaking review is essential to their legendary quality control. Cisco participated in the largest case report ever done on lightweight code review process. To view the actual metrics generated during this assessment, please download a free copy of Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review.

Pain:

Every code review required significant preparation.

• Author had to upload files from Perforce® and select 1-4 reviewers
• Files were reviewed using before/after side-by-side view
• Comments and defects threaded by file, line number
• Review rework required that authors ready defects and upload fixes for verification
• Fixes verified before review is complete

Goals:

• All lawmaking must exist reviewed before checked into version control
• No in-person meetings
• Procedure is enforced past tools
• Metrics collected automatically
• Review-level and summary-level reporting

Benefits:

• By implementing lightweight code reviews, Cisco saved, on average, 6.five staff hours per review.
• Their results drove definitive best practices for code reviews. (Read more on folio 9.)

Results:

Cisco proved that lightweight reviews were just as effective as formal inspections at uncovering defects.

Environs:

Platform: Various | Source Control Management: Perforce® | Development: Various

Developer of Crisis Communication & Response Technology

Company Profile: Leading provider of crisis communication and response technologies. Software quality is critical; code reviews are a company policy. Must identify bugs while software is notwithstanding in development.

Pain:

Squad regularly reviews 500 lines of code projected on a wall and hash out "diffs" (distributed prior to meeting.) During the coming together, participants walk through code to place and resolve defects.

Goals:

• Increase team productivity.
• Permit online collaboration.
• Provide a single repository for reviews that can rail issues in their defect tracking tool.

Benefits:

• Ease of utilize and collaboration features enable online code reviews by virtual teams.
• Reviewers can correlate inline comments and live chats to individual lines of code.
• ROI calculated in months based on time savings.
• Key win: "The time we saved by eliminating the manual process is time we now spend improving the quality of the code."

Results:

Eliminated transmission activities and inefficient formal meetings and so developers can focus on the lawmaking reviews themselves rather than on review trappings. CodeCollaborator flexibility enables teams to enforce code reviews earlier or afterwards source control commits based on Agile process requirements.

Environment:

Agile Platform: Windows, Linux | Source Control Management: Perforce | Development: .NET, C#, C/C++, Embedded C/C##

How Does Code Review Align With Active?

For developers to be open to the notion of adopting code review in Agile environments, they must first have the premise that code review can be agile. Delving into principles that underlie the Active Manifesto provides specific evidence that code review is Agile.

Working software is the principal measure out of progress. Software developers make mistakes. Some mistakes are detected automatically by unit of measurement tests, static analysis tools, etc. Just every bit professional writers rely on human editors and spell-check software to place mistakes, developers benefit from having other developers examine their code.

During iterations, developers devote a lot of time discussing requirements with stakeholders and talk well-nigh the emerging pattern and architecture with other software developers. That's true even when they tend to piece of work in isolation to actually write the code (giving developers a reputation as introverts, at the very least). We know and accept that flaws are uncovered during discussions of requirements, compages, and design. The same principle applies to the writing of the code. Code reviews not but uncover flaws, but they too offering another key do good prized by Agilists – the feedback is kept close to the point of creation and happens sooner – before the code gets into the hands of either QA or customers.

Agile processes promote sustainable development. Projection sponsors, developers, and users should exist able to maintain a abiding step indefinitely. That'southward a alpine order. To meet this objective, Active teams frequently practice collective code ownership. The goal here is to invite team members to get familiar with and understand the code base.

Collective lawmaking ownership fuels sustainable development in many means, considering information technology:

• Transforms team member focus from "specialist" to "generalist" in certain domains.
• Helps to eliminate delays that result when team members are out sick or on vacation.
• Helps to establish common coding standards.
• Fosters a common "look and feel" to the lawmaking base of operations.
• Ensures that anybody is generating detailed documentation.

Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. All software developers have egos, and most are naturally curious people who savour learning new things. In anticipation of code reviews, developers tend to write better code, because they know that their reputation is on the line. No 1 wants to be thought of equally the weak link in the concatenation.

An Agile Corollary: A developer who reviews another'south code can learn new tricks and techniques; a fundamental step in mastering any arts and crafts is to benefit from the feel of others.

The Agile Case for Code Review: Find Bugs Early on and Often

The Agile methodology is grounded in a desire to deliver working software in the well-nigh efficient manner possible. Equally Agilists piece of work to attain this goal, they mostly accept that recognizing and eradicating bugs closer to the point of inception promotes software quality. But accept these developers considered the economic impact of doing and then?

A SmartBear customer fix out to examination exactly how much money they would take saved if the company had peer review in a certain three-month, 10,000-line projection with 10 developers. The concern tracked how many bugs were establish by QA and customers in the subsequent six months. Then they went back and had some other group of developer's peer-review the code in question. Using metrics from previous releases of the development project, the visitor knew the average toll of fixing a defect at each stage of development, so they could measure straight how much money they would have saved if code review was used from the start.

The outcome: Code review would have saved more than half the cost of fixing bugs. Plus they would take plant 162 additional bugs.

Why is the outcome of lawmaking review so dramatic? A lack of collaboration in the development phase may exist the culprit. With requirements and design, you ever have meetings and invite input from customers, managers, developers, and QA to synthesize a consequence. You do this because mistakes in requirements or architecture are expensive and tin can lead to lost sales. You lot then debate the relative priorities, difficulty, and long-term merits of your choices and techniques.

Saving more than $200k: A real-world instance study

Actually writing the source lawmaking, notwithstanding, is a lone activity. Since developers tend to create code in placidity places, collaboration is limited to occasional whiteboard drawings and a few shared interfaces. No ane catches the obvious bugs; no one is making sure the documentation matches the code. Peer code review puts the collaborative element back into this phase of the software development process.

Consider: No book is commercially published without review by professional editors. Scan the acknowledgments in any book, and yous find reviewers who helped "remove defects." The correction and review procedure is a requirement to produce a high-quality piece of work. (And even then, what author hasn't found 5 more errors after perusing the first edition?)

Do nosotros recall information technology's any different in software evolution? How can we expect developers to write pages of detailed lawmaking (and prose) without mistakes? We shouldn't.

If "review" improves the quality of novels and software design, it also improves the quality of code. Peer code review adds a much- needed collaborative element to the evolution stage of the software development process.

Types of Lightweight Lawmaking Review

Lightweight code review provides the right mix of code review process with Agile practice, allowing effective and efficient code reviews without the overwhelming time investments and the burdens that result. In that location are four different approaches to lightweight code review. As with and then much in the Agile world, each team must determine for itself which approach works all-time for them.

Over-the-shoulder

This is the easiest technique of all: when information technology is time for a code review, find a developer and sit down with him or her in front of the lawmaking. Contiguous communication is an piece of cake, high-bandwidth medium for the author'southward explanation of the code.

E-mail service laissez passer-around

Once the code is gear up, it's distributed by email. Although emails offer a more passive arroyo to lawmaking review, content can become nested in multiple replies and hard to manage and search. Further, it tin can be difficult to determine when the review is actually finished.

Pair programming.

A central contribution from the Extreme Programming world is pair programming, which in some ways is a continuous code review. A swell way to share expertise and promote the mentoring of more than junior developers, pair programming review comes with both loftier overhead and the risk that the reviewer is too "close" to the lawmaking, making the review less constructive.

Tool-assisted review.

Lawmaking review tools assist overcome the shortcomings associated with each approach listed above. Tools automate the mundane tasks of code review and can package source files, send reviewer notifications, facilitate overall advice, and ensure that defects are tracked and resolved.

Timing Agile Code Reviews

The beauty of lawmaking reviews is that they not only tin can be timed to add the almost value to your existing procedure, only they also scale easily in Agile environments to accommodate changing requirements and software quality benchmarks.

Effective lawmaking reviews can exist invaluable to the Scrum methodology. In some Scrum teams, developers invest a target percentage of their overall capacity performing code reviews. In such environments, team members are encouraged to fire out their allotted hours for code reviews before the end of each sprint. They also use all-time practices around defining tasks that are granular enough then that the code requiring review is in manageable chunks and does non overwhelm the review process.

Many team leaders adjure to improvements to the overall Agile development experience besides as the productivity of Scrum teams when they designate code review as a requirement earlier a story tin can be marked consummate. Such evolution organizations take succeeded in incorporating lawmaking review into their Agile processes and thus, reap the resulting benefit: higher quality software.

In reality, although higher quality software is certainly a tenable goal, actual metrics are needed to testify the impact of code reviews on software quality. At first blush, allocating time to gather metrics may seem anti-Agile. The question is, how can this endeavour be "agilized"?

Useful Metrics to Assess Agile Reviews

Say the word "metrics" and many Agile practitioners balk. In no way are we recommending that your Agile team implement a cumbersome metrics gathering process. What we do suggest is you choose metrics that are pretty piece of cake to collect to gain useful insight into the value of code reviews.

Keep in mind two things:

• These metrics values are for illustrative purposes only. They vary based on the type of code you are developing. By obtaining and saving baseline information, you can meet how code review adds value to your development efforts over time.
• Code review tools tin can salvage you lot substantial time and automate the collection of these metrics, analyze ratios, and generate related defect logs.

Raw Metric	Definition	Basis
LOC	Lines of Code	Indicative of review "size". Tin be measured in lines of code, pages in document or lines on folio.
Inspection Fourth dimension	Amount of time reviewers spend looking for defects	Indictative of code review time investment
Defect Count	Anything that a reviewer wants changed	Indicative of the review's bear upon.

To make decisions and comparative analyses, analytical metrics tin provide useful data beyond many reviews in a group past author, by grouping, past reviewer, or by ready of files.

*"Defects" refers to anything that the developer wants changed in the code, e.g. a bug in the algoritihim, re-formatting of a comment, correcting a typo, etc.

**This is where contention tin develop. A college defect density means the code reviewers did a great job! Information technology does not mean that the underlying source code is bad or that the developer coded improperly.

Overcoming Resistance

By at present, nosotros hope you sympathise how lawmaking review tin can be adjusted to Agile environments and the sustainable business value it brings. Promoting adoption inside the development organisation is the adjacent step.

Overcoming developer resistance to code review adoption can present real issues. Consider a cardinal Agile Principle: The all-time architectures, requirements, and pattern sally from self-organizing teams. It is the coming together of team members that breeds success; those who don't believe in the process or the tool practice non participate in the journey.

It should exist no surprise, therefore, that when peer code review is mandated by someone outside the team, its chance of success is compromised. Further, when team members practice not want code review to succeed, information technology will fail. The biggest reason for this is the contentious environments that ensue where code review results are used to measure the quotient of the programmer rather than the quality of the code. Attempting to make developers appear at fault is an inappropriate application of code review results and reflects poorly on management that chooses to wield it in this manner.

Another stimulus of contentious review is when developers experience interrogated by those trying to understand why certain assumptions or decisions were made. For example, when a reviewer might ask, "Why did you use that API?" A less threatening manner to elicit the aforementioned information might exist to enquire, "What was the thought backside choosing this API?" Yous will find tone to be a profound influence every bit developers prefer and accept the procedure of lawmaking reviews.

Even when team members support code review, they may still resist adoption. In these situations the cardinal to success is to first slowly. This ways non pursuing endeavors such as: "Starting today, 100% of all code written must be peer reviewed." Instead, to become the all-time return from code reviews based on time invested, endeavor restricting code reviews to only a express portion of the source code.

Some examples:

• Have developers select the "Elevation 10 Scariest Source Files." Only review changes to those files.
• Review changes fabricated only to the stable branch of the source lawmaking.
• Target and review unit tests. Specify that only when unit tests are complete and passing, that the results validate that the underlying implementation is correct.

Broaden the amount of code that gets reviewed after a team has feel with lawmaking review and recognizes its value over time.

The dazzler of lightweight code review is that anybody tin win. Organizations that follow these guidelines will:

• Ameliorate software quality by managing bug remediation closer to the point of inception
• Sustain business concern value by ameliorate adjustment budgets with development effort and cycles
• Notice that developers who experience the benefits of code review and are non threatened by its utilise will embrace it.

vangwhaters.blogspot.com

Source: https://smartbear.com/learn/code-review/agile-code-review-process/

Share this post