The software development methodologies that work for startups don’t necessarily scale as companies grow and mature. Greenfield development is displaced by maintenance, technical debt accumulates, and the oral histories of products become diluted and garbled. Establishing a culture of code review is critical for a growing company to manage these challenges. This is a combined social and technical challenge. Challenges and solutions will be presented based on personal lessons learned from working at two different companies during their corporate adolescence as they transitioned from young, small organizations, and both adopted code-review processes to help manage the challenges of this growth. This talk proposes ways to establish and maintain productive and positive code-review cultures.

Peter is a research engineer at Two Sigma Investments in New York City. Previously, he was a developer of IBM’s J9 Java virtual machine, now OpenJ9. He’s interested in languages, autonomic computing, parallelism, and understanding how groups can develop software more reliably and efficiently.