Mark F., the lead engineer for our upcoming Measure tool, had an informal code review with our lead architect Jim B. this afternoon. The purpose was to review the parts of Measure that will be built-in to Understand 2.0.
These reviews are basically what we do before we check in code that will likely be in the next build. Jim is looking for integration/impact issues in areas Mark might not have visibility into.
But what to check? We don't review each line of code. That takes too long and it doesn't yield good quality returns on the investment of time. Instead we look at edges - where does the new code touch old code, what interfaces change, what dependencies are affected, what new dependencies were created.
Mark first showed Jim this graph (that he made using Measure):
Here is Mark's purpose for this chart:
"Created a code volume graph of the Measure libraries that Understand will now depend on, just to give an idea of their size. I pointed out that measureuiplugin and measureapiplugin are the two libraries that are now linked into Understand. I then pointed out the size of those two libraries compared with the size of the other Measure libraries, just to show that only a small part of Measure’s entire code base is being used in Understand. "
Mark then showed Jim a high level dependency graph created by Understand 2.0:
The graph helped him explain:
" I pointed out that measureuiplugin only depends on measureapiplugin, and that measureapiplugin depends on three external libraries. One of the libraries was already a dependent of Understand, but two of them were added as new dependents"
He then compared his working copies of the Understand source files to the ones currently in our SVN repository. He has his differencing tool for winSVN set to TrackDiff (a diff tool derived from TrackBack). They then reviewed primarily the interface changes made to the various Understand 2.0 menu and signal/slot definitions.
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