[Box Backup-dev] Reviewing code

[Martin Ebourne]

Ben Summers <ben at fluffy.co.uk> wrote:
> It is an interesting code management project to make and review changes
> with part time developers. Anyone know how other projects cope? Maybe
> in future we could try and do things in smaller and more incremental
> chunks?

For the majority of projects the barrier to code entry is lower. =20
Especially for developers with commit access most projects let people =20
just get on with it and hope to catch things either by people glancing =20
over commit messages or just testing/working with the code.

In the case of box though I think it makes a lot of sense to set the =20
barrier high. Backup software is always under tested (in the sense =20
that users don't tend to keep a close eye on it and only notice =20
something bad when it fails) and over relied upon.

Some projects are notable exceptions though, and on these I suspect =20
it's just a case of less changes per man-hour are eventually made. =20
Then you just need more people to achieve the same rate of feature =20
growth (although the end result should be higher quality we hope). =20
Pity this poor guy for instance (you have to click on the replies on =20
the left):

http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/8/1/296

Cheers,

Martin.