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Tuesday, August 13, 2019

The Quest for the Perfect Tool

I have recently been involved in an effort to pick "the perfect Code Review Tool." That's really a funny idea when you think about it. "Perfect" could mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, even if they all agree what is.

Consider the case of find "The Perfect Car." The perfect car for what? The perfect car for carrying your teenage daughter and her friends around? The perfect car for to commute 50 miles a day to work and not spend half a weeks pay on fuel? Maybe it's the perfect car for running brisk TSD rallies on the snow covered back roads of central NY?

The same problem happens when looking for the perfect software tool. Even limiting it down to a specific tool, a Code Review Tool, isn't enough. There are still too many questions that come up: Does the whole team do reviews or only a couple of dedicated reviewers? Pre- or post-commit reviews? How does code review fit into the rest of your process? How big is the code set? Is only one project going to use this, or is it becoming the standard for many projects? What do the other projects want? What other tools are in use that it has to integrate with? How much money is there to spend? What platform does it have to run on? The list just keeps going on.

Sometimes the quest for "The Perfect " becomes less about finding the and more about finding out what you really want. As Joe Jackson once sung "You can't get what you want, until you know what you want."

So how do you find out what you want? That's a good question to blog about in the future.

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