> In David Crawshaw’s recent post “The agent principal-agent problem” there’s a lot of insight beneath the headline “Code review is broken.” Worth reading carefully.
> Toward the end, David reflects on what he calls the old “cowboy” development culture at Microsoft in the 80s/90s. Not much has been written about that era, mostly because there was no social media, no laptops everywhere, no phones recording daily engineering life.
> A few thoughts from someone who lived it.
Conclusion:
> A lot of software quality did not come from pre-commit review gates.
> It came from tight teams, deep ownership, brutal integration pressure, system-wide stress, and developers who fully understood the machinery they were standing on.
It begins:
> In David Crawshaw’s recent post “The agent principal-agent problem” there’s a lot of insight beneath the headline “Code review is broken.” Worth reading carefully.
> Toward the end, David reflects on what he calls the old “cowboy” development culture at Microsoft in the 80s/90s. Not much has been written about that era, mostly because there was no social media, no laptops everywhere, no phones recording daily engineering life.
> A few thoughts from someone who lived it.
Conclusion:
> A lot of software quality did not come from pre-commit review gates.
> It came from tight teams, deep ownership, brutal integration pressure, system-wide stress, and developers who fully understood the machinery they were standing on.