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…
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.
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.
Weird, never heard of anyone doing this. Aren’t your team self reviewing the code while writing it?
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?
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.
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.
What do you think a self review is?