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Code reviews help the organization to improve its overall approach to tooling and automation. Code reviews will help you to turn yourselves into a better engineer. It also helps the developers and teams to understand the underlying concept. A successful strategy for code review demands a proper balance between strictly documented processes and a collaborative environment. In this article, we are going to share about Code review best practices and how to do it properly. A successful strategy for the code review process demands a proper balance between strictly documented processes and a collaborative environment.

What Is A Code Review 

Code review is a quality checking process in which source code is analyzed by a skilled team or by using an automated code review tool. The main goal of this process is to find bugs, resolve errors, improving coding quality, and more. Code review is the mandatory process that every software company needs to follow to get good quality at the end. 

When To review

Developers need to conduct code reviews after the automated checks have been completed successfully. The review process should start before the code merges to the repository’s mainline branch.

Preparing Code For Review

It is the sole responsibility of the author to submit code reviews that are easy to review. We recommend you to submit complete, self-reviewed, and self-tested CRs. To save reviewers’ time, you need to run a test suite before submitting the code reviews.

Code Review Checklist

This checklist help developers to ensure that code is understandable, DRY, tested and follows guidelines.  The checklist needs to cover things like code formatting, architecture, design principles, object-oriented analysis, and non-functional requirements. 

Code Reviewers Responsibilities

The project needs to propose one or two reviewers. Code reviewers are equally as responsible for the code shipped as the person who wrote the code. Code reviewers are responsible for ensuring that the code is well-architectured, maintainable, secure, and correct. 

5 Points How To Do Code Reviews

It is the responsibility of code reviewers to enforce coding standards and maintain the quality bar up. Follow the below-mentioned steps to do the code reviews.

1) Understand the code completely.

2) Check the code quality. 

3) Ensure that the code is tested well.

4) Check whether the code is safe to deploy or not.

5) Make sure that the final code does not have security holes and loops.

Code Review Best Practices

Let’s get into the best practices for performing an effective code review. A code review process entirely differs from company to company, and team to team. It’s a methodology that needs small changes according to the projects and members getting involved. 

Review For Not More Than 400 Lines Of Code At A Time 

The developer needs to review about 200 to 400 lines of code (LOC) at a time. Because the human brain can process only that amount of information at a time. Beyond 400 LOC, the ability to find errors easily diminishes. 

Set Goals And Standard

Before conducting a code review process, it is important to focus on deciding important metrics and define unambiguous objectives. The next step is to set acceptable coding standards in your company. Having a specific set of standards ensures that each software product developed in the company meets the standards. 

Communicate Goals And Expectation With Your Team

Communication of goals and expectations is important to get better results in the end. Knowing what is expected from a developer makes it convenient for them to understand and complete the task. 

Review For 60 Minutes

You should not take more time to review the code, you should not review code too fastly. When people engage in certain types of activity over some time, they fail to maintain concentration after about 60 minutes. This shows that you can concentrate only for 0 minutes, you need to take rest at specific intervals of time to maintain concentration.

Authors Should Annotated Source Code Before The Review

The authors should have to annotate code before conducting the code review. An annotation is a useful tool throughout the software development cycle. Annotations guide the reviewer through the development process and it defends the reason behind each code modification. It helps code reviewer to know and understand the code better. 

Use Code Review Checklists

There is a possibility that each person on your team can make the same mistakes over and over. Checklists are the most effective way to eliminate errors. It is hard to find defect omissions in a specific area because it’s difficult to review something that isn’t there. Code review checklists offer team members clear expectations for each type of review.

Establish A Process For Fixing Defects Found

Most developer teams do not have a systematic method for fixing the bugs. The great way to make sure that defects are fixed is to use a collaborative tool that lets reviewers log bugs, discuss them with the other, and approves changes in the code.

Foster A Positive Code Review Culture

Code reviews are used to evaluate the developer’s performance. Each bug is a chance for the team to improve code quality. Peer review enables junior team members to learn from senior leaders.

Practice Lightweight Code Reviews

Start with a lightweight and tool-assisted process to review the code. This process requires only up to six participants and some hours of meetings paging through detailed code printouts.

Automate To Save Time

Automated code review tools can save a lot of time for a software company. These types of tools can reduce code review times to a few seconds. They can easily scan the whole codebase in less than a minute to find defects and provide solutions for them.

Conclusion

Code review is the common trusted code quality practice followed by top companies. The code reviewer’s responsibilities are to ensure that each code in the project is up to the quality standards. You can use Automated code review tools to speed up the code review process. We are the top software service provider in Bangalore. We can help you with your code review process.