Re: Code Review - What Medium?

[jhourcle]

A number of folks ( gawatkins, Tanktalus, GrandFather ) have mentioned that part of their reason for prefering on-screen review is that it provides them with syntax highlighting.

This isn't an issue for me, as I have access to a color printer, and a text editor that will print its syntax highlighting, not only display it on the screen. (and even when I print to the non-color printer, I can make out differences in shades, although if I try to print pages 2-up at 9pt, some of the 'colors' become illegible from dithering)

Others ( kirbyk, tlm, and anonymous ) have mentioned working with others, or in a team during the review. As I'm two time zones away from the next closest programmer on my current project, the best I have for collaboration is IM, and pushing files around through CVS and/or email.

I think my big question in this whole thing is what to do people consider to be 'review' ...

Much of what people are talking about (actively making changes, or making sure that the changes have the desired results), I would consider to be debugging, or in some degards, tuning. When I hear 'review', I think of a much more higher level thing -- attempting to look over the logical flow of code, and trying to understand it, often to determine how we can refactor it. Sometimes, it's trying to make the code more modular, or trying to remove redundancies. Other times, it's just me trying to understand how someone else wrote their code. (eg, trying to understand how SOAP::Lite works, so I can override the serializer to do what I needed).

So, are we all even discusing the same sorts of activities here?