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Monday, February 02, 2009
Read the Diffs
Do you work as part of a software team? Here's a piece of
advice for you:
Read
the diffs.
Every morning before you start your own coding tasks, use your favorite diff tool to look
at all the changes that everybody else checked in the day before.
There is a reasonable chance that this advice is worth
exactly how much you paid me for it. :-)
Still, many of the best developers I have known do make this
their habit.
Reading the diffs is very likely to produce two benefits:
- The code might get better. Reading the diffs is
like an informal code review. You might find something that needs to be
fixed.
- You might learn something. Maybe one of your
coworkers is using a technique you don't know about. Or maybe reading the
diffs simply gives you a deeper understanding of the project you are
working on.
Of course, use some common sense about whether this habit is
practical in your situation. For example, if you work on a team of a thousand
developers, this probably won't work well for you. Then again, I assume if you
work on a team of a thousand developers, almost nothing works well for you, so
this habit might fit right in. :-)
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