Why code reviews matter

-
Agile teams are self-organizing, with skill sets that span across the team. This is accomplished, in part, with code review. Code review helps developers learn the code base, as well as help them learn new technologies and techniques that grow their skill sets.

So, what exactly is a code review?

When a developer is finished working on an issue, another developer looks over the code and considers questions like:
  • Are there any obvious logic errors in the code?
  • Looking at the requirements, are all cases fully implemented?
  • Are the new automated tests sufficient for the new code? Do existing automated tests need to be rewritten to account for changes in the code?
  • Does the new code conform to existing style guidelines?
Code reviews should integrate with a team’s existing process. For example, if a team is using task branching workflows, initiate a code review after all the code has been written and automated tests have been run and passed–but before the code is merged upstream. This ensures the code reviewer’s time is spent checking for things machines miss, and prevents poor coding decisions from polluting the main line of development. 

What's in it for an agile team?

Every team can benefit from code reviews regardless of development methodology. Agile teams, however, can realize huge benefits because work is decentralized across the team. No one is the only person who knows a specific part of the code base. Simply put, code reviews help facilitate knowledge sharing across the code base and across the team. 

Code reviews share knowledge

At the heart of all agile teams is unbeatable flexibility: an ability to take work off the backlog and begin execution by all team members. As a result, teams are better able to swarm around new work because no one is the "critical path." Full stack engineers can tackle front-end work as well as server-side work.

Code reviews make for better estimates

Remember the section on estimation? Estimation is a team exercise, and the team makes better estimates as product knowledge is spread across the team. As new features are added to the existing code, the original developer can provide good feedback and estimation. In addition, any code reviewer is also exposed to the complexity, known issues, and concerns of that area of the code base. The code reviewer, then, shares in the knowledge of the original developer of that part of the code base. This practice creates multiple, informed inputs which, when used for a final estimate always makes that estimate stronger and reliable.

Code reviews enable time off

Nobody likes to be the sole point of contact on a piece of code. Likewise, nobody wants to dive into a critical piece of code they didn’t write–especially during a production emergency. Code reviews share knowledge across the team so that any team member can take up the reins and continue steering the ship. (We love mixed metaphors at Atlassian!) But here's the point: with no single developer the critical path, it also means team members can take time off as needed. If you find yourself tied to a desk on the version control system, code review is an excellent way to find freedom. Freedom to take that needed vacation, or freedom to spend some time working on a different area of the product.

Code reviews mentor newer engineers

A special aspect of agile is that when new members join the team more seasoned engineers mentor the newer members. And code review helps facilitate conversations about the code base. Often, teams have hidden knowledge within the code that surfaces during code review. Newer members, with fresh eyes, discover gnarly, time-plauged areas of the code base that need a new perspective. So, code review also helps ensure new insight is tempered with existing knowledge.
ProTip: Keep in mind, code review is not just a senior team member reviewing a junior team member’s code. Code review should happen across the team in every direction. Knowledge knows no bounds! Yes, code review can help newer engineers, but by no means should it be used solely as a mentoring exercise. 

But code reviews take time!

Sure, they take time. But that time isn't wasted–far from it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PostgreSQL bytea and oid

-
I came across with following issue when i'm trying to save the uploaded file in to the database as a byte array using hibernate, JPA 2.0  annotation with Postgre SQL. even though in this stage i'm pretty much new to Postgre SQL, It has two type of data types to represent the binary data or BLOB, since i'm using hibernate jpa annotations use the annotation @Lob to indicate the byte[] of data to persist as a binary data. @Lob   @Basic(fetch = FetchType.LAZY)  public byte[] getPicture() { return picture;  }    exception : java.sql.SQLException: ERROR: column "picture" is of type bytea but expression is of type oid   Then i understood the issue with the data types.but when the hibernate generating the table it creates the  column with data type "oid" , after removing this annotation it creates a table column with "bytea" data type. and i'm in doubt which would be the most suitable data type to use.   Then i found the difference be
Read more

Adding MySQL datasource to JBOSS AS 7

-
Retrieve the MySQL Connector The connector can be downloaded from:  http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/ . The current version at the time of writing is 5.1.24, further sections of this guide assume that version number. Unzip the connector to your downloads folder and save the location of the main JAR in a variable which we can refer to later: Add a Module to AS 7 AS 7 uses a module system to provide isolation in class loading. We need to create a new module which contains the MySQL Connector J JAR. Move to the the AS installation directory and create the folder structure for the new module: export JBOSS_HOME =~ / Development / jboss-as-web-7.0.0.Final cd $JBOSS_HOME mkdir -p modules / com / mysql / main Copy the driver jar to the new directory and move to that directory: cp MYSQL_JAR $JBOSS_HOME / modules / com / mysql / main cd $JBOSS_HOME / modules / com / mysql / main Define the module in XML. This is the key part of the process.  v
Read more

Microservices Architecture with Spring Boot in 15mins

-
Image
1. Introduction Microservices is not a new term. It coined in 2005 by Dr Peter Rodgers then called micro web services based on SOAP. It became more popular since 2010. Micoservices allows us to break our large system into number of independent collaborating processes. Lets see below microservices architecture. 1.1 What is Microservices Architecture? Microservices architecture allows to avoid monolith application for large system. It provide loose coupling between collaborating processes which running independently in different environments with tight cohesion. So lets discuss it by an example as below. For example imagine an online shop with separate microservices for user-accounts, product-catalog order-processing and shopping carts. So these components are inevitably important for such a large online shopping portal. For online shopping system we could use following architectures. 1.2 Shopping system without Microservices (Monolith architecture) In this architecture we are
Read more