what approach has worked best for you?
Only one objective: pass a code inspection/peer review, with me as the reviewer, without me finding any bugs or having any other criticism, that has me asking you to redo something.
Notes:
- I wasn’t measuring new hires’ ability to finish quickly, and didn’t encourage them to: I wanted people to learn how to finish well (because if it’s not finished well, then it’s not finished)
- People learned what I looked for in a code review: so it’s a learning opportunity and a quality control measure, and not just a management objective
- My comments would have two categories:
- This is a bug: you must fix this before you check in
- As a suggestion, I would have done such-and-such
- After a while, my reviews of a person’s code would stop finding any “must fix” items (at which point I wouldn’t need to review their work any more).