Code Review / Practices and tips

As the developing of software is in process, there must be a time for debugging and code revision. Theses stages must take place many times in the developing process because of the impact they can made if one knows how to apply them in a great way. Debugging can help us to find a solution for a code problem that we cannot find. While making a code review or revision can help us to identify if the flow of the code is wrong or if it is taking more time that it should. The revision process in software engineer is as important as the first steps of planning the structure of the system that is being made.

Code review has many types of practices and ways to evaluate your own code or the code of someone else. The importance as mentioned before is to identify if the code has a great structure for some other developer to understand. Also, it is important to analyze the complexity of the algorithms that are used so that with the revision the code can be upgraded to a more efficient and faster one.

One of the most important things and one of the first that one should know when doing a code revision is that the objective is not to critique de author of the code, but to help that induvial in finding complexity errors, bad structure practices, or wrong flows of process, so that with a constructive conclusion one can help others in becoming a better programmer. This process helps most of the ones which are participating because everyone can see a and analyze a different perspective to make the code much better.

Now that code review has being explained in a conceptual way, there are several practices that are used to make revision better and more accurate. But first, one must understand the main three pillars that I have named as Pillars of Code Review which are the following:

• Define type of code
  • When doing a code revision, one must define the type of code that is going to be reviewed, this is because depending of the type, one must take different kinds of perspectives whether the structure is the most important factor, or the flow of processes.
• Define a scope
  • Before starting to analyze the whole code, a scope must be stated so that it doesn’t become tedious to analyze a huge project. It is way better to resolve the problems by parts like dynamic programming.
• Make suggestions to improve the code
  • After giving the whole review to the code, it is important to make an argument of what points or segments of the code should be improved to have a more efficient and powerful software.

These pillars if used correctly and in a wise way, one can truly become a better programmer by realizing of the weaknesses one has. There are other several good practices that are more structured but can help to make a code revision better.

Some tips to have an effective code review are the following:

• Make a checklist to stablish a path for revisions.
• Set goals and metrics to measure with great and useful data.
• Practice lightweight codes at first to be better each time.
• Do not review code for long periods of time, it can be really tired and become stressful at some point.

These tips help us identify some disadvantages of doing a code revision, which are that there must be a short period of time for the review. It can be exhausting at some point, and many times the structure of the code will make the revision quite difficult if the programmer can’t even read his or her own code.

To conclude with code revision, I can say that this tool is very powerful when trying to improve coding skills. It is something that every programmer should practice and learn from others who had participated in other code reviews.

Be brave enough

to suck at something new