The following was a response I made in an email exchange with Tom Elliot of the Pleiades Project and Bethany Nowviskie. Our conversation was prompted by Tom’s inquiry on planning, budgeting for, and conducting a code review as part of a grant-funded project. What follows is a slightly modified (and expanded) version of that email conversation.

Testing and code review is something that has been on my mind a lot lately as our shop has been shifting its focus from boutique, one-off projects, to building upon frameworks maintained by other organizations. As these code bases continue to grow, we need to ensure that subtle changes to the core functionality of the underlying systems do not propagate into bugs in our code. We also need a way to handle this situation quickly and efficiently when this does arise. This was especially reinforced by two recent projects our group undertook to migrate nearly decade-old software on to new servers.