May 11, 2019

Code Reviews

  —Developing a shared resource through code review.

In, Code Reviews I discuss my philosphy on code reviews. In this arcticle I wanted to highlight something written by Sam Jarman in Giving and Receiving Great Code Reviews.

Sam states that a code review is:

Code review is a time to discuss and debate code that is going to be owned by the team going forward. A member, or members of the team will write the code, and the rest of the team, or a subset will determine if it’s at a standard such that’ll be a good value add to the codebase./

Essentially, the rest of the team determines if the code is at a standard such that it will be a good value to add to the codebase. Simply, the best description of purpose for code review that I have read.

I like this definition because it introduces

• the notion that the code base is a shared resource used by the team to accomplish something and that as a shared resource all (or potentially all) team members can have a say in what is added to this resource.
• some many good notions regarding what an effective team should care about: shared ownership, common standards and best practices.
• the notion of interaction–discuss and debate the quality of the patch.