Development teams in companies spend considerable amounts of time, resources and effort to design reliability into the applications they build to support business processes. Ask anyone responsible for delivering products or services about building quality and reliability into their offerings and they'll all tell you the same thing: it's a lot less expensive to build quality and reliability into processes upfront versus fixing problems in the field.

I came across a paper the other day in Better Software titled, "Code Improvement" by Jeff Grover and Zhon Johansen. It's a short, but good article focusing on developing well-designed code. My favorite point was "Start/Finish each task by refactoring". In other words, stop the entropy of expanding your software solution by ensuring that the code is as minimal as necessary to meet the requirements. There are parallels in the CM world that ultimately lead to a reliable CM process and tool support capability. In this article, I'll venture where I don't usually go: inside our own development environment to bring out a few points that may apply equally to general development and to a CM environment.

The essence of Extreme Programming (XP) is making the customer a part of the team who works very closely with the developers, ideally communicating on a daily basis. However, what about a situation where your development team is offshore? Is it possible to have the best of both worlds, realizing the gains of offshoring without losing the benefits of XP? How do you keep the momentum and the communication flow going, at the same time ensuring seamless integration of the deliverables into the customer's production environment at the XP pace?

The authors explore the pros and cons of four other common styles of code reviews—over-the-shoulder, email pass-around, pair programming, and tool-assisted reviews—and see which ones is the most promising candidate for practical peer code reviews.