Today I learned how Google facilitates (developer) knowledge sharing across their teams. Internally, Google calls this the readability process, a form of standardized mentorship through code review.
“Code-review?”, you may ask, “What’s so special about that? Don’t all successful technology companies practice code-reviews?” You are right, and Google also has these regular code-reviews. But the readability process, is different in some key ways. Here is how I understand it:
readability reviews are mandatory for all code commits (not on the commit-level, of source, but for a set of commits) readability reviews are performed by qualified individuals, who are well versed in the companies’ software development guidelines and best practices anyone can become a qualified readability reviewer, ensuring that knowledge is shared across teams, essentially across the whole company Anyone can become a qualified readability reviewer To qualify, you simply need repeatedly submit your pull requests to a central group of qualified reviewers for your specific programming language.
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