Laura Nolan, Slack
Reviewing designs written by other engineers becomes an increasingly large (and important) part of our work life as we become more senior in our careers. We review designs for entire new systems written by partner developer teams. We review designs for pieces of automation to be developed and run by our own teams. Eventually we may find ourselves using review as a way to keep many teams in sync technically.
Most of us however, don't have a systematic way to approach reviews. We read the proposal or attend the meeting, and we look to our experience to try and predict problems. This is valuable, and experience can't be replaced—but I believe we can do better by applying both our expertise and a checklist of things to consider for each design.
Laura Nolan, Slack
Laura Nolan is an SRE who believes in the power of checklists to help us tame complexity and chaos. She is one of the contributors to the books Site Reliability Engineering and Seeking SRE, both published by O'Reilly.
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author = {Laura Nolan},
title = {Reliable by Design: Adding Value in the Design Review Process},
year = {2019},
address = {Singapore},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jun
}