Project Review: DueDates

Overview:

It's always good to review each other. It allows us to take a look at source code of others so that we get new insight. At the same time we also get comments from other developers about what was good or what should be improved. Therefore we did review on our project, DueDates.

Process:

First of all, members of each project made a copy of their source code to "svn/tags/Review-2008-10-20". We did it because this way we can save frozen snapshot of the system. If developers want to update their source code in "trunk", they don't need to wait for reviewers to finish and can always make changes.

Next we started to review source code of other projects. From the project page I went to "Source > Browser" and took a look at "svn/tags/Review-2008-10-20". I will see the code, so if there is something I noticed and I want to make comments, I do it by double-clicking the code so that small section to post will pop up. Then I went to "Changes" which is located right next to "Browse" and clicked the version I reviewed, then left comments there.

Review:

It's really good to know how other developers tried their best for the development. Since we worked on the same problem, we can easily understand the flow of program and what the issue is. Here is something I learned from other projects. One project was showing "Processing..." while they connect to database and get a result. I was thinking the connecting process takes a little long but didn't show any words like this. I think this is very user friendly. Other project was showing menu. It's also nice since as we enhance this project later it will have a lot more capability, and instead of using option we can choose from menu. For my project, I got some comments that I should clean up a bit more, and also some comments that our output of the library information is easily understandable to read.

Conclusion:

Reviewing is a really good way to improve each other. The only con is it takes some time to give out useful comments. I thought Google Code is a very useful tool for this purpose. When I make a review next time, I will take notes of what others were doing and I will try to remember them for future use.