Beyond Legacy Code

Schedule Code Reviews and Retrospectives

Pair programming is essentially code review as you’re writing it. In fact, that’s where the term Extreme Programming came from. Kent Beck called it Extreme Programming because what we want to do is take the things that seem to have worked for us in the past and take them to a logical extreme.

Honestly, I don’t feel that Extreme Programming is all that “extreme.” In many ways it’s the way software should have been built all along. Even some of the most conservative and business-minded people in the industry prefer Extreme Programming.

Still, in the thinking of Extreme Programming, if code reviews are a good thing, why don’t we review every line of code as we’re writing it? That’s where pair programming ...