Learn About Code Review
Code review is a fundamental part of software engineering. It is a process where engineers review each other’s code to improve its quality and receive feedback. Code review gives your teammates the ability to look at your code closely and catch potential mistakes and bugs early on. This can help stop small issues from turning into larger issues later on. Code review also increases awareness of what teams are working on, encourages cross-pollination between teams, and facilitates discussions about coding standards.
Code review allows you to share knowledge with your team about industry and team best practices. You can uplevel each others’ skills by offering feedback on how to make each others’ code better. You can ensure consistency of code by ensuring contributions to the code base follow the same patterns. When the codebase follows the same patterns, it’s easier to understand, maintain, and grow a project.
There are clear guidelines you can follow to improve your code review process. You should set clear goals for code review by specifying what you want to achieve, usually maintaining high code quality, sharing knowledge, and making sure everyone uses consistent coding patterns. This will set the stage for a focused code review. Give feedback that will improve your teammates’ coding ability instead of just pointing out problems. You should always provide suggestions on how to fix the problems. You can make the code review process smoother by using tools that automatically check for common issues, like code style. These automated tools can catch problems that can be missed in a manual review.
There are some common mistakes and traps that people follow into during code review. You don’t want to focus too much on the nitpicky code style. You should have a discussion once about code style, then you should automate it away which will lead to consistent enforcement of the rule and save your team time so they don’t need to constantly look for code style mistakes.
Pay attention how you give feedback because code reviews involve people. You should be positive and considerate when reviewing other people’s code. Recognize the effort put into the code and create an atmosphere where everyone feels encouraged to work together.
As the code author, you should develop a sense of empathy for the person that is reviewing your code. This means making the review process as smooth as possible for them and being grateful for the time they spend reviewing your code. This can mean adding context in your pull requests and including before and after screenshots.
Remember that code review can have many benefits in software engineering. It helps to keep code quality high, encourages teamwork, and it makes sure that everyone follows the same patterns. Software engineers can use code review to boost the overall success of their development efforts.