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CommodityQuant
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Posts: 57
Joined: July 5th, 2007, 6:16 am

Code reviews by people who left.

January 3rd, 2023, 12:00 pm

Suppose some quant code is approved by a peer, and the peer then leaves the company soon after, before the
code is taken to the next stage.  Should the approval stand, or should another approver be found?
I know that the answer may well be "It depends".  In that case, it would be good to have some criteria as to 
what it depends on.  This type of thing must be a common situation but I have no idea what industry standard
practice is.  I see pitfalls both ways.  It seems dodgy for an approval to be based on someone who recently left;
OTOH, asking for another review on this basis could sound like an insult to the recently-left person and could 
ruffle the feathers of people who support that person's work.  Any suggestions?  (I don't know why the person left,
but that could be part of the equation if I did know).
Thank You.
CommodityQuant
 
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Alan
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Joined: December 19th, 2001, 4:01 am
Location: California
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Re: Code reviews by people who left.

January 3rd, 2023, 4:24 pm

Just thinking out loud, maybe the review should be a periodic thing, say every 6 months or when a reviewer leaves. Certainly in 6 months, the code will be different, or obsolete, or the world has changed, or whatever. Of course, in production, there should be some knowledgeable users that can spot obvious problems on an ongoing basis. 

Maybe a goal should be a decent review document so that the subsequent (perhaps different) reviewers will have an easier time updating the review. 

If the existent documentation, procedures, and version control is very poor, maybe this is a good time to start from a scratch.    



 
 
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katastrofa
Posts: 7440
Joined: August 16th, 2007, 5:36 am
Location: Alpha Centauri

Re: Code reviews by people who left.

January 7th, 2023, 10:22 am

A bit off topic, but the question intrigued me: isn’t the notice period intended to sort such things out smoothly?