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Friday, May 21, 2010
Code inspections
Phil:
But I don’t think this will ever happen, for political reasons. Nobody likes to have their errors exposed publicly. The current system, where peer review is mostly private, allows everyone to save face.
Furthermore, professors would probably be somewhat reluctant to criticize other professors, so the most effective critiquing would come from outside of academia. I am pretty certain that academic Ph.D.s, as a group, will never stand for a system that lowers their status by having laymen publicly correct their mistakes.
When we used to do code inspections, a record of all code inspections would accompany the source code. It would show everything.... except the name of the programmer who wrote the initial code, but would include the names of the inspectors. Basically, it was not used to judge the quality of the programmer, but the quality of the code, and how good the inspectors were at finding problems. (The code inspection stopped once one of the managers insisted on including the programmer’s name… the result there was that the programmer would go out of his way to deliver perfect code, and so, making the value of the inspectors almost non-existant… of course, the programmer had to waste so much extra time, that it was inefficient to deliver perfect code this way.)
Anyway, a bit hard to do with an authored paper, but, still, I like some of the stuff Phil proposes.
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