In an extreme programming project, programmers do pair programming most of the time.
As these pairs also rotate, that is, you pair program with different people, and there is a sense of collective ownership, source code is being frequently reviewed and updated.
Being so, is there a need for code reviews? I mean, stop programming and actually just do code reviews.
Best Answer
One of the key resources for Extreme Programming is that of Ward's Wiki aka Portland Pattern Repository aka C2.com. This is where a number of people hashed out various methodologies and documented them as they used them.
Within this wiki, there is a page: Extreme Programming Code Reviews that has a number of contributors to it, including Ron Jeffries and Kent Beck.
To this, they said:
There is also quite a bit more discussion on the topic there from others.
The key points though being that with the combination of tests, collaborative ownership and pair programming these things resolve the goals that a code review is typically supposed to do such as:
These are being done continuously through pair programming and automated testing in Extreme Programming and thus an explicit Fagan inspection is unnecessary.
Related reading: