Patroklos Papapetrou is a chief software architect, addicted to software quality and an agile team leader with almost 20 years of experience in software development. He believes and invests in people and team spirit seeking quality excellence. He’s one of the authors of SonarQube in action book and he recently founded his own consulting and training company. He’s an occasional speaker giving talks about clean code, code quality, software gardening and other cool stuff he wants to share with fellow developers

 

Q. You’re speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest in March. Tell us a bit about your session.

 

Like I usually do, I pick topics and sessions based on my day-to-day job and tasks. During the last months I have reviewed a lot of code and I have discussed with many developers about their code. Some times reviews didn’t go as expected. I learned many things the hard way and I would like to share my experience with fellow developers how it feels to review code and how difficult it is to earn other colleague’s respect. I will discuss more than the basics, what made me better reviewer and how to deal with developers psychology.

 

Q. Why is the subject matter important?

 

Code reviews is an essential practice that all development teams should embrace. I’m not sure however if more than 50% of development teams do actually code reviews, and from this 50% how many of the teams are doing professional code reviews. People hate code reviews because either they find it boring (as reviewers) or they don’t want to be judged (as developers being reviewed). Who wants to read code instead of working on a new and sexy JS framework? Who wants to have his issues exposed and revealed to a code review system that anyone can look at? I will try to explain how to overcome those fears and how to make core reviews a productive and fun activity.

 

Q. Who should attend your session?

 

Developers, developers, developers. It doesn’t matter if they already do code reviews or not. Anyone can get something from this talk and contribute also with their experience.

 

Q. What are the key things attendees will take away from your session?

 

Attendees will understand the importance of code reviews, the essential automation tools to help then being productive, how to prepare themselves before reviewing code. We will also discuss about setting objective standards and learn a few but important aspects developers psychology and how deal with different kind of developers while reviewing their code.

 

Q. Aside from speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest, what else are you excited about for 2017?

 

Well, it happens to be the organizer of another two Voxxed events in Athens and Thessaloniki so I would like that I’m not excited about both. Especially the first edition of Voxxed Days Athens is something I’m really looking forward because we have invited some amazing speakers including Douglas Crockford