For code revision, I will first talk briefly talk about some of the best practices when doing code review and then talk about personal experience with this topic. Let’s start by defining what is code review. Code review is when one or more people check a program you wrote by reading parts of it. The reviewers help find defects with the code and find better solutions to the problems the code is trying to solve.
Some good practices are important to get the most out of code reviews. First, don’t review too much code at once. Second, don’t rush the review, reviewing 500 lines of code should take about an hour. Third, the review shouldn’t really take more than an hour, meaning that you shouldn’t be reviewing more than 500 lines of code at a time. Fourth, it is very important to set goals before starting a code review, you need to know how you will measure the effectiveness of the code. Lastly, always do code review with a positive attitude. Getting all your mistakes pointed out by your peers may not be the most pleasant thing, but it needs to be done. There are many more ways to improve your experience with code reviews, but the tips given here should give you a good idea of what to do.
Now I will go over my experiences with code reviews in the past. Last summer, I had the opportunity to do an internship at a software company. Code reviews were a part of the internship and they really helped me, but I can understand why it’s possible to find code reviews frustrating at times. My experience with code reviews is an interesting one. The first code review I experiences were really helpful. I was working on Android development for the first time, so there were some best practices that I didn’t implement. Those got pointed out to me and I fixed them. After that, I didn’t make the same mistakes again. Later in the internship, I came across quite a big problem with my code. The code reviews slowly, but surely helped me. What happened was that I had an error in my code and it was pointed out. I tried to fix it, however, it turned out that the way I fixed wasn’t really fixing it, well, it fixed the error, but created more. This happened a few times until I was able to reach the correct solutions. I think the problem was my attitude towards the code reviews, even though they helped me, they could have helped me even more if I followed the core review best practices.
Code reviews are a powerful weapon if it’s in the right hands. A bad attitude can cause the collaboration between team members to worsen. Moreover, doing too much at a time during code reviews can actually reduce the chance of finding defects in your code. A good code review will drastically increase your code quality.
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