1. I think a last building (and maybe even regressing) snapshot would be nice.
>The other tool I believe to be very effective in improving code quality is
>code review. My experience is that review is both more effective and
>cheaper than testing in finding problems.
Yes. But actually we (in or development company Spardat) don't do it here.
What we do is ask a coworker to review, when we are not too confident about a change.
>To that end, I suggest we create
>a group of volunteer reviewers, possibly with their own mailing list. The idea
>is not to impose a bureaucratic barrier to submitting patches, but rather to
>allow people who have an idea to get some assistance on whether a given change
>will fit in and work well. I see some people on this list using the list
>for this purpose now, I merely propose to normalise this so that everyone
>knows that this resource is available to them, and given an actual patch
>(rather than mere discussion) to be able to identify specific persons to do
>a review.
I am not sure if I would not rather see those that have enough knowledge to judge if a patch
is good or not and have time to really do reviewing, contribute to the code itself.
There are a lot of things on the Todo, and another lot that did not make it to the list yet.
The last beta freeze was actually reviewed by Bruce and Vadim.
Maybe a review team would be good during beta freeze to take some work off of those two,
but I am not sure that a review team is necessary and productive during a development phase.
Andreas