Today in this article we will learn Code Review Best Practices and Guidelines. Code review is the process of reviewing the code written by developers.
This review is performed more from the various aspects and often just not limited code quality which we generally think.
Today in this article, we will cover below aspects,
Continuous code review implies reviewing code Code for its quality, sharing the knowledge, building a review culture, and building confidence in the Team on the code they are working on.
- Foster best coding practices for any requirements.
- Code Style and Coding guidelines enforcement.
- Making team members a good developer – Share your knowledge and expertise.
- Identify coding issues.
- Find bugs in the early phase.
Many young and even experienced programmers tend to write code and logic without following any checklist of best practices of coding and tend to make some mistakes.
It’s important to understand that when a feature or code is near to the release Or production readiness continuously, the team gets a lot of flexibility on revisiting the features, introducing a change in a feature updating an implementation, or making changes to code as per the requirements.
Also, the team can revisit on design and architecture of applications if needed.
The team keeps on integrating code even if the feature is not complete.
The idea here is simple, issues are easy to fix when they are small and reviewed regularly.
Foster Best Coding Practices Checklist
One can prepare a more generic list as per their organization’s practices and foster it to be used as a checklist while the developer writes their code.
- Review the code by using a checklist.
- Use a checklist while reviewing the code.
- Often keep track of old code changes versus new changes.
Good review fosters a healthy review environment helping you identify bugs in the early phase of software development.
Best Coding Practices are language Agnostics
Most of the Best Coding practices are language agnostics. To name a few items (not limited to) examples are as below,
- Checking code is written for business requirements.
- Is the code-breaking existing functionality?
- Checking of Unit test cases are written for the new code
- Checking proper Error handling is implemented Example: Invalid parameter, null references, etc.
- Checking memory leaks issue if any.
- Checking Code Performance effective code.
- Checking documentation is created for the code written.
- Checking Security issues in code. Examples – OWASP’s guide
- Checking for Thread safety of code.
- Checking Business exceptions and technical exceptions are handled correctly in code.
- Checking Technical exceptions are handled correctly in code.
It’s easy to get carried away but best practices are always countable and often generic in nature.
Follow Review in CI-CD world
Performing frequent reviews is key in the CI-CD world. Developers should develop the habit of writing code for small features and get it reviewed as early as possible.
Often code developed over 1- 3 days the period should be integrated with a mainline branch (often called as “Master” branch).
The developer often uses short-lived branches developed over 1-3 days to merge them back to the master by raising code review.
Considering the time frame and developer productivity of 20-30 lines of code per day, on average 100 lines of code should be good to get started with code review.
Automate Code reviews process- COTS product
It’s important the manual effort spent on Human review produces an effective result.
However, there are many COTS products available in the market helping you perform code reviews, provide comments and raise a defect, and track a code review or defects until it gets fixed.
A good review automation process will do the following,
- Create a code review request
- Easy integration with your IDE environment
- Ability to add comments or view comments
- Ability to create bugs/defects
- Ability to keep track of review comments.
Architecture and Design Review – Don’t miss it.
Architecture and design reviews are very crucial here. Often developers do code development by following the architecture and design put in the first place.
But it is possible that code written to comply with the given architecture may not follow it fully and might be breaking the architecture and design. Such coding issues are difficult to understand affecting the overall architecture.
A well-written code doesn’t guarantee, that it will fit the purpose design for the given requirements.
It’s important Code reviewer verifies the impact of code on the design and architecture.
Scheduling of Code Review
Perform the Code reviews when the feature is in the development phase.
Generally when code still remains in the working branch or short-lived branch.
Performing code review before the code merges to the repository’s Master/Mainline branch gives the developer the ability to constantly track the code for its quality.
Finding coding issues/bugs early in the phase is the key here.
Quality Code Review comments
Code review comments are important.
- Reviews should be writing comments in neutral language.
- While reviewing the code, tell the developer about the issue in a positive manner.
- Avoid criticizing someone in the comments,
- Don’t be judgemental in the comments.
- Write more precise, short, and explanatory comments.
Productive Code Review
The ultimate goal of code review is good code quality and facilitating a technical conversation among the team members.
While performing a Productive code review, please follow the below,
- Understand the requirements and convey your ideas and tech to the Team.
- Choose Healthy comments over arguments.
- Setup your priorities
- Respond to the developer’s comments and help them understand the ask.
- Share any existing guidelines, documentation, or website links within the code review.
Summary
Writing better code quality code is not an afterthought process.
Continuous development and continuous review of code are key to achieving organizational goals.
Clean and good quality compliments any other enterprise process initiative of an organization.
Code review assists developers in learning the code base as well as new technologies and practices that help them expand their skill sets.
Do you have any comments or ideas or any better suggestions to share?
Please sound off your comments below.
Happy Coding !!
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