Code Reviews: The "Secret" to Building Quality Software

Sponsor:
Robert Half Technology (http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/) is sponsoring pizza!

Talk:
If you're really good at writing software, your code will be flawless, right? Well, not exactly... Even the best of us overlook things and make an (occasional) mistake. Even if the theoretical "perfect developer" did exist, could you find (and afford) a whole team like that? One way to minimize the risk of mistakes is requiring all code be reviewed and tested by a second person before it goes to production. Larger organizations may have separate QA people, but this is not always feasible for a small team. The developers already know the code, so get them to review each other! I'll talk about how to incorporate code reviews and testing into your workflow with (relatively) little impact on your team's velocity in exchange for big improvements in code quality.

Speaker: Patrick Schwisow
Patrick has been into web technologies since the "bad old days" when animated GIFs were required on all sites and the BLINK tag still had some supporters. He suffered through several years of procedural programming in PHP4 before discovering the glories of OOP in PHP5. Patrick is a Team Leader and Senior Software Engineer at OpticsPlanet, Inc. in Northbrook, IL, and regularly works with Zend Framework, Doctrine 2, Symfony 2, and several less fun technologies. After hours, he's the founder and organizer of the Lake / Kenosha County PHP Users Group.