CodeReviews

A good code review can feel like magic. A skilled code reviewer will deftly work through each part of a pull request, noting potential problems and proposing elegant solutions. If you’re like many developers, you recognize a good code review when you see one. You’ve probably even created a few yourself. But you’re probably also a bit unsure as to how to make sure that your code reviews are good every time.

One way to improve your code reviews consistently is to create a code review checklist that you run through every time you review code. A checklist makes sure that you don’t forget anything. At the same time, that checklist will stop you from turning the code review into a giant slog. You don’t want a simple code review to take hours, but you also don’t want to be the person who approves sketchy code, either.

In this article, we’ll break down the core parts of a pragmatic, lightweight code review checklist that you can use with your team.

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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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