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Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Are Formal Peer Reviews Valuable?

Are Formal Peer Reviews Valuable?

It depends. Do you think they are valuable? Or do you think they are a waste of time? In either case, you are correct.

If you think they are valuable, you will do them right. And they will help you find defects in important documents or source code.

If you think they are a waste of time, but are mandated to do them anyway, you will only go through the motions with a Checkbox Attitude. And they won’t be valuable at all. You will then notice afterward that they didn’t help at all, providing you "evidence" that you were right. A self-fulfilling prophecy. This will cause you to resist peer reviews even more next time, and do an even worse job next time. A positive feedback loop.

The same is true of any process improvement tool.

Which is why I believe that:

1) Management should never force employees to use a process improvement tool they don’t believe will be helpful, because the employees will end up being right!

2) Instead of mandates, management should focus instead on convincing people, using evidence, that such tools can be helpful.


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