What do you look out for in your code reviews? Is the quality of your code reviews consistent? Do you use a code review checklist?
There are several reasons why the quality and thoroughness of code reviews may vary significantly across pull requests. Some reasons for inconsistency in code reviews include:
A code review checklist is a useful way to improve the quality and consistency of code reviews. Consistent use of checklists decreases the likelihood that a reviewer's focus is skewed toward specific areas of interest or convenience at the expense of other important areas.
Dr. Michaela Greiler has done some remarkable work on helping software engineers improve their code reviews. This post presents a checklist, based on Dr. Greiler's work, with 62 things to look out for in code reviews. The questions in this checklist are structured such that each question can be answered with either a YES, NO, or Not Applicable (N/A). In theory, the likelihood that a code change is of acceptable quality is inversely proportional to the number of “NO” answers to the questions in the checklist. Many of the questions in this checklist are subjective and almost completely at the discretion of the code reviewer.
This code review checklist is also available as a spreadsheet to edit and improve as you please.
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