Use the power of peer reviews
Goals
Improve software quality, promote shared ownership of code and spread knowledge within a team.
Description
Code reviews can help to improve software quality, promote shared ownership of code and help to spread knowledge about a code base within a team. Issues that are resolved early are cheap issues.
Environment
All
Platform
All
Implementation effort
Minimal – just grab a colleague and present your code ;-). Tool support is helpful though as it decouples the participants and can easily tie in with a CI system.
Applicability
–
Caveats
- Make sure to create an environment where code reviews are actual peer reviews, not top-down audit-style reviews by a senior developer.
- Make sure to create an environment where people feel safe to participate.
See also
Implementation hints
- To support the reviewers and to improve consistency consider a checklist with general issues to look out for.
- Avoid wasting expensive reviewer time by having a first review stage where the review is done by bots (formatting issues, issues from static checkers, unit tests, spellcheckers, …).
