Crucible White paper on effective code review

Read the white paper on effective code review.

What are code reviews?

Code reviews, or code inspections, are known by many names and come in many degrees of formality: inspections, reviews, code walkthroughs, desk-checks and pass-arounds.

Whenever members of a team check another team member's code, code review is occurring. Even pair programming is a form of code review.

Why do code reviews?

Improve code quality. Performing regular code review helps find and correct defects in your code.

Find bugs when they are the cheapest to fix. Find a bug earlier in your software lifecycle, and you can fix it earlier in the lifecycle. Fixing bugs found by a customer can be ten times more costly than fixing them soon after they are introduced (white paper, page 3).

Know your code. Having your team perform code review is a great way to ensure the whole team is familiar with the system.

Mentoring. A review process can be an important part of the mentoring activities in your team.

Audit trail. A formal review process is a great way to have an answer the next time an auditor asks "do you have a record of that?"

Read the white paper

Every programmer has had the experience of struggling to find a small but elusive bug. No matter how much you study the code, you simply can't see it. So you ask a colleague to come look over your shoulder. As you explain the problem you're trying to solve, one of two things happens:

  1. You spot the problem yourself while explaining it to your colleague.
  2. After you describe the problem, your colleague immediately finds the likely cause.

We need to get a little help from our friends through the simple technique called peer review. In this free white paper, Karl Wiegers discusses using a lightweight tool to support implementing reviews in your team.

Read the white paper (202 KB PDF).