CodeReviews Archives - Software Quality Blog

The Top 5 Automated Code Review Tools for 2019

June 25, 2019Eric BoersmaNo Comments

A tool with a trophy signifying the best automated code review tool When you’re coding by yourself, for yourself, your code style doesn’t matter that much. Developers the world over have GitHub profiles full of horrible, ugly code they wrote to tinker with some new library or language. Their goal wasn’t to write pretty code, it was to learn something new. That changes when you’re working in a software team, though. Now you need to make sure not only that your code is functional, but that it adheres to team standards.

There are many ways to make sure that code written for a professional team meets requirements around styling and complexity. Every team should be doing peer code review before code is promoted to production. This review ensures not only that your code does what it’s supposed to, but also that other people can understand it, and that it meets the team’s style requirements.

Like manual code review, automated code review is a critical part of writing high-quality code.

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Code Review Tools: The Different Kinds and 3 You Must Have

May 14, 2019Carlos SchultsNo Comments

A butler, a bouncer, and a nerd Code review is one of the most common topics here on the SubMain blog. Today’s post covers this subject again, this time attacking a very specific angle: code review tools. If you’ve been a software developer for a while, you’re probably familiar with at least a few of them.

But do you know the different types of tools out there? Would you know how to categorize them? Knowing how to do so might be the difference between adopting the right tool for the right situation or being paralyzed by doubt. Which situation would you prefer?

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Team Room Problems: 5 Signs of a Toxic Code Review Culture

March 19, 2019Mark Henke4

Code Review biohazard Many people have explored the concept of code reviews at length. They continue to be an integral part of the developer experience, for reasons I will discuss below. But, like most things that challenge us to improve, they can easily become awkward and a host for a variety of toxic behaviors. A number of articles have been written about proper code reviews, and they usually center around the idea of “being nice.” But I’m going to hone in on a few slightly different signs of toxicity in your code reviews. And with each sign, I’ll help you understand how you can change your team’s behavior to create a healthier environment.

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exasperated programmer with her head on a desk resenting code review practices

The 4 Code Review Practices That Make Devs Quit

January 8, 2019Carlos SchultsNo Comments

If we start with the premise that having code reviews is better than not having them, the next step is to figure out how to make them better. And though we’re all aware that code reviews are a good thing, they can quickly degenerate into toxic scenarios. We don’t want that.

In this post, we’re going to see four code review practices that can make developers feel frustrated and alienated. In the more extreme cases, developers might even leave a company to escape from what they perceive as tyrannical, nonsensical demands. Keep reading to learn what those practices are, how to avoid them, and how to leverage the benefits of automation in your code reviews to prevent many of these toxic scenarios from happening in the first place

Once you know that, you’ll be empowered to turn your code reviews into healthy processes that lead to higher code quality and more happiness for the developers in your team. Let’s get started! (more…)

Automated Code Reviews: 5 Manual Checks You Can Automate

December 4, 2018Mark HenkeNo Comments

I am curious about how infrequent automated code reviews seem to be in the workplace. As software developers, we pride ourselves on our ability to automate away other people’s problems. Much of what we do is scrutinizing manual work done by our customers or business stakeholders. We find tasks that could be performed more efficiently, automate them, and the customer hopefully praises our efforts.

Yet it seems that we rarely scrutinize our own work. Manual code reviews run rampant on many software teams. We take our “expert opinion” and turn it into either a mental or written checklist. Then we apply the checklist through manual labor, looking over one file at a time. Oftentimes we miss things; perhaps we’re tired or distracted by other tasks.

Why not do to our own processes what we do to others: automate them? After all, computers will be better at handling some of these checklist items than we are.

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How Much Time Do Programmers Spend Debugging? Too Much

November 27, 2018Mark Henke1

We’ve all been in that situation where you’re streaming along, banging out some sick code for a new feature. You’re excited to see how many minds you’ll blow when you demo it. And then you see a blip on your radar. Something is going wrong with your production system. Oh no. You give it a cursory look and you realize you don’t understand what’s going on. At this point, you know your day is shot. Why? Because you already know you’ll need to spend too much time debugging.

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Web.config: 5 Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

October 23, 2018Mark Henke2

We as software developers have created several disciplines for coding: test-driven developments, clean code principles, and screaming architecture, to name a few. However, we often find our web.config files can sprawl out of control. We just don’t pay as much attention to our configuration as we do to our classes and methods. The good news is that many mistakes are easily avoided, and with a little discipline we can put our configs on par with the rest of our codebase.

In this article, I’ll show you how. We’ll look at five of the most common configuration mistakes and how to avoid them.

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code_review_prep_runner_preparing_for_race

Code Review Prep: 4 Tips to Eliminate Inefficiency

September 25, 2018Carlos SchultsNo Comments

Code review is, hands down, one of the most fundamental best practices a software shop can employ to produce better software. A good code review practice can shed light on design problems, improve the readability of the code, and spread knowledge throughout a team. It also helps you find bugs early (when it costs less to fix them).

Code reviews sound like a gift from the heavens, right? While far from being a panacea, I’d say they are a spectacular tool to ensure software quality—when done correctly. And that, of course, is the tricky part. It doesn’t take much for a code review practice to go downhill. If you’ve been a developer for at least a few years, then I’d bet you have your share of scary stories to tell.

But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. Forget the truly horrific stories—toxic workplaces and the like. Today we’re going to cover inefficiency in code reviews. Or, more precisely, we’ll offer you tips on how you can avoid it.

So, without further ado, let’s get to it: four tips that will help you when preparing to implement a code review practice in your software shop.

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Code Inspections? Get Over Yourself.

June 26, 2018Melissa McEwen9

When I last looked for software engineering jobs, I came across a post that looked perfectly normal until I got to a line that said, “Participate in daily code inspections.” What the heck was a code inspection? It sounded pretty serious. And we’d be doing it every single day?

A quick Google search brought me to a Wikipedia page for “software inspection,” which told me that “code inspection” was pioneered in the 70s at IBM. My grandfather’s cousin happened to work there at the time, so I asked him to weigh in. He said they were a “formalized effort by team members to go over each other’s code.”

But things have changed a lot since the 70s. And often, vintage terminology is a sign of other outdated development practices. (more…)

Writing that says "rules, you must, you must not"

Using CodeIt.Right to Create C# Coding Standards

June 5, 2018Carlos SchultsNo Comments

Does your team use a coding standard? If the answer is no, then I’m afraid you’re missing out on a lot of important benefits. This post will help you create (and automate) C# coding standards using Submain’s CodeIt.Right. I’ll start out by making the case that you need a coding standard. We here at the SubMain blog have already covered that subject, of course, but I’ll revisit it anyway.

With that out of the way, I’ll go on to explain the most common problems that occur when teams try to implement coding standards and code reviews manually.

Finally, I’ll show you how automation can heal these pains, and how to use CodeIt.Right for doing so. Let’s get started. (more…)