Links

www.Tick-the-Code.com is the best resource on Tick-the-Code.

This is a collection of interesting links to software inspection related articles, papers and websites.

This list wouldn't be complete without mentioning Wikipedia. It doesn't mention Tick-the-Code, yet.

Jerry Weinberg wrote with Daniel P.Freedman "Handbook of Walkthroughs, Inspections, and Technical Reviews".

Tom Gilb wrote the excellent "Software Inspection" with Dorothy Graham. I'd recommend "Principles of Software Engineering Management", too.

Deleting code by Ned Batchelder

In Praise of the Lowly Comment by Mike Gunderloy

The Problem with Programming is an interview with Bjarne Stroustrup by Jason Pontin.

SmartBear Software have collected several white papers about code review in here. Although I'm not convinced about the need for a tool, the papers are worth reading and the book was definitely worth its price.

Robert Bogue writes about "Effective Code Reviews Without the Pain". Some of the ideas make perfect sense, but he is also thinking about the classical reviews instead of goign extreme and finding something like Tick-the-Code. For example, the idea of having to write long review comments assumes that the rules aren't predefined. There are some good things in the article, like the psychological awareness. Code reviews are often meetings between people and defensiveness or aggressiveness can become problematic. Quite surprisingly, Mr. Bogue goes on to almost praise offline reviews, which is the whole point of Tick-the-Code. You avoid the psychological awkwardness, and with clearly defined rules you avoid it totally. You are not just haphazardly criticizing a colleague because you are having a bad day, you are checking that he has been following the coding standard. It is nothing personal.

Six Language-Independent Ways to Write Better Code by Alex (?) contains some good points (Magic numbers and useless comments are items from Tick-the-Code rule set), although I can't completely agree with all of them.

A reviewer friend of mine suggested a review tool called Jupiter. See for yourself here.

Static analysis tools

PerlCritic is "a static source code analysis engine". It helps in creating and applying coding standards to Perl source code.

PMD scans Java source code and looks for potential problems. Here's a list of similar projects.

General knowledge

How to best make organizational change happen? That's the question this article (The Neuroscience of Leadership by David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz) tries to answer. It uses brain research to explain how the brain itself and that way also the behaviour of an individual can be changed. I happen to think this applies to learning a new way to inspect code too. The keyword is attention and repeating the experience after the initial training session. That's why it is vital to perform the first code tickings on the week following the training session. That way the brain creates new connections making it easier to tick again and again.