Reading to the class

I recently watched Managing Programmers by Douglas Crockford at Silicon Valley Code Camp. One of the ideas Crockford mention is daily code reads. I think this idea is great, but getting people to buy into it would be hard. That made me ask the question. How could you improve code quality more: have all the engineers meet for an hour to talk about recent checkins or have all your engineers work on unit tests for an hour?

I don't have an answer right now, but I think it is an extremely interesting question. Getting an hour of group code reading would be a hard sell to a manager, but saying that an engineer is only writing tests an hour of the day would have many managers saying, "too low!"

Anyway, the whole thing made me think about how when I was a kid in school they would have kids stand up and read from a book to the class. Is your code and engineer quality so high that you can have any one of your engineers pick any piece of your code and explain it in a meeting without preperation? I think that this is the goal of a organization that produces and maintains code.

This goal is two part. 1) Make your code very easy to understand. 2) Make your engineers good. Both these goals are tackled by code reads. Having everyone read and analyze the readability of code will improve it. Also sitting around and talking about code will improve your engineers.