Chapter 20: A REVIEW TO A KILL Performing Code Reviews

• A review places source code under the microscope—really aiming to criticize and verify it.
• Code reviews are excellent tools to detect and eliminate hard-to-find bugs, to increase code quality, to enforce collective code responsibility, and to spread knowledge.
• As we write a system, we need to ask whether to review the code and, if so, exactly which code to review.
• Select the code you review carefully. If you can’t review everything, make informed choices about review candidates. Don’t guess—you might waste your precious time.
• No one’s code is above review and peer scrutiny. Actively invite review of your code.
• The success of a code review depends heavily on the author and reviewers adopting a positive attitude. The aim of a review is to collaboratively improve the code, not to apportion blame or to justify implementation decisions.
• If you don’t know what good code looks like, then you can’t make a valid judgment of other people’s work.