Elastic Leadership

Chapter 14. Review the code

by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)

One of the biggest mistakes that new software team leaders make is to consider the code written by the programmers as the private property of the author, as opposed to an asset owned by the team. This causes the team leaders to judge code based on its behavior rather than its structure. Team leaders with this dysfunction will accept any code as long as it does what it’s supposed to do, regardless of how it’s written.

Indeed, such team leaders often don’t bother to read other programmers’ code at all. They satisfy themselves with the fact that the system works and divorce themselves from system structure. This is how you lose control over the quality of your system.

Once you lose control, ...