automatic design review

[cellio]

Another developer has joined the ranks of those who have learned that asking me to document something will expose you to a design review -- not because that's my explicit goal, but because I ask the kinds of user-oriented questions that may or may not have come up before but probably didn't get followed through. The result is generally a cleaner API that is more coherently-explained.

None of these developers have complained about this, by the way. They seem to appreciate it (and have been known to compete for my time), and I'm glad to be working with people who can appreciate it. (I, in turn, understand the concept of something that's sub-optimal but not going to get fixed. My job is mostly to ask the questions...)

Apparently the developers here have a shorthand for this phenomenon now: they call it the "Monica effect". :-)

Comments

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

I can vouch for you on this one. Have they figured out your naming abilities yet?

[cellio]

They're starting to. One developer routinely comes to me when he needs naming help (or just wants validation), and others are generally responsive to my suggestions or questions. (Sometimes the answer is "it's the Java convention", and being new to the language I just didn't know that.)

A few months ago one developer implemented a couple new classes and then, before writing code against them, handed me the files and told me I could change whatever names I wanted. Cool. :-) (He knew some of the names were bad, but he didn't have time to fix it.)

Often (though of course not always), if you're having trouble naming something it's because the design is still a little muddy. I'm not sure how many of my developers have come to see that yet. But I've only been there a few months.