(Almost) Painless Code Reviews

Peer code review is universally acknowledged as a valuable practice that often catches 60 percent to 90 percent of the bugs in code. So why would most developers rather be poked in the eye with a sharp stick than attend a Fagan style inspection meeting? Take a cue from the crowd working on Wine (www.winehq.com), an open source implementation of the Windows API. The Wine team has evolved code review practices to avoid the chaos and poor communication that can result from a team of part-time developers distributed across the globe. Frederic Boulanger explains how to adapt the Wine code review system to the needs of a commercial software development team. The "single committer" review method improves code quality, helps keep errors out of source control, and quickly integrates new developers into your team.