Code inspection, software review

The patterns that guarantee software quality are no other than software review and code inspection patterns. These concepts are in charge of going through activities performed by others to find design defects that are produced throughout the development of the software.

These types of reviews test, control and generate metrics of others to evaluate the quality of it. And it is as important as every other process in software development. For example, Google, Facebook and every other big company are generating millions of lines of code each day. To ensure quality and less errors, they assign teams to check and review the code of others. So, more senior engineers can help other newer developers to start improving coding best practices and approaches to solve complex problems.

This code inspection assures a better software quality. And it is divided into many types of reviews and inspections like the following:

• Internal review: As explained before, this review is made by other people inside the company to check for quality and human errors.
• Inspection: This type of analysis of code focuses on strict rubrics to check and has a very clear objective.
• Test: This review is the most used one, because it analyzes if the software can run, and if it is running as it needs to.
• Management: This is a more abstract review, because it focuses and the real status of the software. It looks for a management approach to improve the code.

For each type of review there are roles that need to be assigned for the evaluation to take place. Most of them use a developer or multiple developers with the knowledge to inspect the code correctly and with the ability to improve it. There are other roles in the management area which are in charge of documentation and conclusions for the review.

In small and medium companies, code revision and management of it is most of the times done by the team of developers. But for a perfect quality assurance there are companies and freelancers which have the main role of inspecting code and write a review of it to improve the quality, security, and understanding of it.

These roles and responsibilities of them have the objective to find the key work products. These are the plans, requirements, design, and code.

Software review is not only about code. Or it shouldn’t be. Because the code that was programmed was first planned and design, and if those steps were the ones with a flaw or a problem, then the code will continue that path. So, software review takes care of finding the best approach for a plan and the design of it. But, how did it gets that key info?

Experience and completed cases. The requirements of software development have similarities between them, so, to ensure the best quality of them, one must look back into other projects and find the key for their success. With that, new design patterns are made. New code best practices and so on. So the key products need a person or a team with key information to know exactly or at least more accurately the solution for a better software. That is what software review stands for.