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…
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.
Problem space and solution exploration - an iterative and at times experimental process to find and weigh solutions
Cleanup and self-review - document your findings, decision-making, exclusions, and weighing, verify your solution/changeset makes sense and is complete (to intended scope)
Reviews
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.
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.