Examples of Code Review Checklists and Guides

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This is part three of the series on improving efficiency of code review process in my team. Earlier I wrote about a couple of free books on code review and a few articles where developers shared their experience in code reviews. I’m still exploring the practices of other teams and this time I want to post a few links to code review checklists that I found helpful.

• Stop More Bugs with our Code Review Checklist by Gareth Wilson from Fog Creek Software. This checklist is pretty universal and should work with various programming languages. It includes a few generic questions as well as questions about code security, testing, and documentation.
• Code Review Checklist — To Perform Effective Code Reviews by Surender Reddy Gutha actually consists of two checklists: a basic and a detailed one. The basic one checks if the code is understandable, DRY, tested, and follows guidelines. The detailed checklist covers code formatting, architecture, best practices, non-functional requirements, object-oriented analysis and design principles. Both checkboxes can be applied to code in various languages.
• Creating Your Code Review Checklist by Erik Dietrich talks about creating two checklists: one for the code author to make sure that code is ready for review and another one for reviewers.
• MediaWiki Pre-commit checklist, Getting reviews guide and Code review guide and checklist are good examples from an open source project.
• Java Code Review Checklist by Mahesh Chopker is a example of a very detailed language-specific code review checklist. It covers security, performance, and clean code practices. It also includes a few general questions too.
• Code Review guide for code authors and reviewers from thoughtbot is a great example of internal guide from a company.