Brian Houck, principal program manager at Microsoft, describes the Code Review experience in Azure, sharing with us how static analysis tools are used to shift problems left, how code review is pivotal in avoiding security vulnerabilities, how code review supports building community and the role it plays it onboarding developer to new teams. Brian talks about the unique challenges faced in Azure and Windows: issues of scale and churn across multiple platforms and languages, the need to support code review across team boundaries, and challenges finding experts in such a complex and large scale system.  He also talks about the future design of code review tools that must address these challenges and integrate with unique developer tools. In the following Q&A, Brian discusses dealing with biases in software practices, as well as why mixed research methods are needed to understand and support the challenges they face in his team.

This Q&A was recorded live as part of a workshop on Code Review and Assessment,  at a Senior Topics Course in Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria on Oct 25th, 2020.

In preparation for today's workshop,  we read/watched materials posted on this page. 

This Q&A is also available on YouTube.