lilmatt's blog

Ok, so maybe 100% is a little overblown, but not by much.

The reality is that up until the 0.9.1/1.0 development cycle, Flock had little in the way of what Mozilla folks would think of as code review. There was a "buddy system" in place where your code buddy would look over your code post-checkin. However when deadlines approached and bug counts rose you can guess how religious folks were at checking someone else's code.

Around the time that we were finishing up Flock 0.9.0, we took a look at the state of our trunk versus the 0.9.0 release branch. It wasn't a "clown wreck", but it was too scary to consider releasing from. At this time I was asked to take on the role of configuration manager. This boiled down to "you don't check in without a=lilmatt since it's his butt on the line if the tree is borked". Since having me in the critical path puts us at risk of a bus error, we added some trusted friends to the approval pool, and thus drivers@flock was born.

Since that time, we instituted some coding style guidelines, as trying to read and review code from a bunch of developers, each with their own slightly different coding style, was rather... challenging. We also bit the bullet and added an explicit review step. So the process is 1) make patch, 2) get review, 3) land and bake on trunk, 4) get approval for release branch, 5) land on release branch. Sound familiar? My thought was to go with what you know works.

The end result is that the code in 0.9.1 is markedly better in quality than our earlier releases, and 1.0 is shaping up to be better still. Our code is also significantly more readable, which is good news for developers looking to add a provider for a particular web service we currently don't support.

I'm a pessimist and pragmatist by nature, so I'm naturally not satisfied. There's always more cruft to excise or cleaner interfaces to create. However, we've come an enormous way in a tiny amount of time, and that isn't something I can take credit for. My hat is off to my colleagues, who accepted and tried this review thing, and who actually made it work. Having your work critiqued is never an easy thing, nor is it often pleasant. However folks took it on faith that this would help us. Thanks folks.

Thanks also to Mozilla for refining a review process I could more or less copy verbatim. It works.

...and since I mentioned it, you can sign up for the 1.0 beta here.