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How not to do code reviews
- Traditionally, code reviews involved engineers scrutinizing a colleague’s code for errors and ensuring its readability, efficiency, and maintainability.
- However, this approach results in bottlenecks especially in large teams, because the right reviewers don’t always have the capacity to review changes when necessary.
- Modern code reviews can move beyond error finding and instead focus on growing a team that can maintain a healthy codebase in the long term.
- Michael Fagan first described code reviews in his 1976 paper, an error driven process that famously emphasized functional issues that impact software’s runtime behavior, causing it to break or produce incorrect results.
- The modern approach focuses on higher-level concerns, such as knowledge transfer, code architecture, and long-term code maintainability.
- Automated unit and integration tests are far better at finding logical bugs in code than human reviewers.
- Static code analyzers analyze code and its dependencies for potential security flaws.
- Code reviews are almost exclusively focused on evolvability defects, such as checking for missing documentation, improving algorithmic efficiency, and reducing cyclomatic complexity.
- This feedback and discussion is to grow a team that can build a healthy codebase in the long term.
- Code reviews should focus less on error finding and instead prioritize knowledge sharing to avoid knowledge silos and encourage team growth.
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