Drupal articles

We've heard of test-driven development, behaviour-driven development, feature-driven development and someone has probably invented buzzword-driven development by now. Here's my own new buzzword phrase: review-driven development. At ComputerMinds, we aim to put our work through peer reviews to ensure quality and to share knowledge around the team. Chris has recently written about why and how we review our work. We took some time on our last team 'CMDay' to discuss how we could make doing peer reviews better. Here's some of our thoughts. Many of them are essentially answers to this question: Why is reviewing hard? How can we make it easier?

Anyone familiar with the Drupal core development lifecycle will know that presently the Drupal community supports two major versions at any one time: the current major release and its immediate predecessor. This means that at ComputerMinds we are currently helping our clients support and develop both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 sites. So the obvious question that we get asked is ‘when is it time to upgrade’?

We can’t properly answer this question without bringing the next major release, Drupal 9, into the mix. So let’s look at the development timeline for these three versions. According to a blog post...

At ComputerMinds we like to think that we’re all pretty good at what we do; however, nobody is perfect and this is why we always ensure that our code is properly peer reviewed as part of our quality assurance process.

Peer review is literally just what the name implies; we work together to review each other’s code to make sure that it all makes sense. This approach means that we’re able to spot obvious mistakes before they become a problem. It also has the huge advantage of allowing us to transfer knowledge between our team on a day-to-day basis.

Pull

Growing and maintaining a healthy workplace culture can be really hard. Keeping people happy and not just working hard can get more difficult over time, so we're super proud of our 'Minds for all that they contribute to our offices and our livelihood. It is so often the people alongside you that can make or break your day, and we consider ourselves very lucky to have such a great bunch of guys and girls making the CM world go round.

With offices in both Bristol and Coventry, CM can sometimes feel a bit fragmented. However much Slack can bring the...