Tips for Improving Code Review Efficiency
I spend an hour or two a day reviewing my team-mates’ code. Even though code reviews help our team to produce quality code and share knowledge, spending that much time on code review every day sounds like a lot to me. I’d like our code reviews to be more efficient and less time-consuming.
First of all I decided to check what other developers recommend. I found these articles particularly helpful:
- Better Code Reviews Through Empathy by Cory Chamblin from PagerDuty.
- What to look for in a Code Review by Trisha Gee from JetBrains.
- Best Practices for Code Review from SmartBear blog.
- 7 ways to uplevel your code review skills by Sara Tansey from Asana.
- 10 Simple Code Review Tips for Effective Code Reviews by Surender Reddy Gutha from EvokeTechnologies.
- Code review guidelines by ludovicianul.
- Code Review Best Practices by Vlad Mihalcea.
The articles complement each other nicely. There is not much overlap between them: some focus more on the review process steps, others on what should reviewers pay attention too. In general they recommend to:
- Prioritise the goals of code review with the team, i.e. learning from each other and spreading knowledge. Create a checklist for code authors and code reviewers.
- Spend less time on reviewing code formatting, naming, and style. Use automated tools for checking coding style instead,
- Spend more time reviewing code for potential defects, maintainability, and the use of design best practices.
If you found these tips useful, give some claps below or a share on social media. Thanks for reading!
