CodeReviews Archives - Software Quality Blog

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

March 19, 2019Mark Henke4

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…

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…

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,…

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.

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.

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…

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…

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…

How Do You Evaluate Code Readability?

January 23, 2018Erik Dietrich2

Evaluating code readability is actually pretty easy. I’ll explain it in a way that you can easily illustrate with a flow diagram. And you can see if you agree with my assessment. Did someone else write this code? If so, it’s not readable. Did I write this code but more than six months ago? If so, it’s not readable. Otherwise, it’s readable. Sound about right? I kid, but only kind of. This tends to be my visceral, subconscious reaction before I reign myself in and think rationally. And I bet the same is true for a lot of you reading…

Code review vs pair programming (as shown here): which should your team pick?

Code Review vs Pair-Programming: Which One Should Your Team Pick?

January 3, 2018Carlos Schults3

Some weeks ago, I was browsing Twitter when I saw this: Pair Programming > Code Review — Rafael Ponte (@rponte) November 19, 2017 This prompted a brief discussion between the author and me. He made good arguments, but I left unconvinced that pair programming was the obvious winner. As someone who’s implemented code review with success and also paired to some extent, I could see how both practices can be valuable. But is one of them clearly better than the other? Are code review and pair programming interchangeable, or are there scenarios in which one clearly shines? That’s what I’m going…