Minimize the review burden by applying the review on a smaller bits of code

March 26, 2006 by Artem

Peer code reviews are known friends of a good code quality. Many of the agile methods strongly recommend them. XP as usual goes to the extreme point and offers the pair programming practice, when the reviews are performed continuously.

The usual problem with the code reviews (unless you practice the pair programming) is that they are often performed after writing a big block of code and reviewers can concentrate on the micro level issues like coding conventions and style. It is important to enforce the common conventions, but it would be great to pay bigger attention to the code logic.

The modern version control systems including even CVS provide the excellent feature to aid the code reviews - commit emails. Every time the developer commits the changes to the repository, it is possible to send an e-mail with the code changes, task name and description to the team leader, assigned reviewer or just everybody interested. This way the review process goes much faster and what is of biggest importance helps to find stupid errors earlier, saving you from spending yet a lot of time on debugging.

Have you ever try code reviewing initiated by commit e-mails? Does it work for you?

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