As anyone who has worked with me is well aware, I’m a great believer in code reviews – there is much to be said about a number of positive impacts on the project (and the developers’ professional growth too).

This is a great article that sums up very well the benefits, as well as a few suggestions about how to make code reviews work for your team:

Practical Lessons in Peer Code Review

This is one of many reasons why it is important to split your work into manageable units. […] By making an effort to organize our work by story and submit reviews that pertain only to the specific story we are working on, we write code that is much easier to review.

Personally, I believe that code reviews must be done properly, not just as an empty formalism: I recently witnessed a project where code was submitted (at times, hundreds or even thousands of lines of code) and just got a cursory “Ship It” without a single comment (which was only fair, given that the reviewer was someone without direct knowledge of the code, or the programming language, for that matter).

I cannot help but wonder how many bugs and programming inconsistencies will have slipped by…