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

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…