#Best code review tools manual
#Best code review tools software

#Best code review tools software

Recent work by Tom Gilb, one of the more prominent authors dealing with software inspections, and his colleagues continues to support earlier findings that a human being inspecting code is the most effective way to find and eliminate complex problems that originate in requirements, design, and other noncode deliverables. As Capers Jones and Olivier Bonsignour wrote in a blog post titled 'Do You Inspect?': But just because somethingвЂ™s painful it doesnвЂ™t mean it isnвЂ™t worth the effort. Beginning back in 1976, when IBMвЂ™s Michael Fagan published his groundbreaking paper, 'Design and Code Inspections to Reduce Errors in Program Development,' the idea of a formal, systematic code review caught on quickly (with earlier versions of peer review tending to be less structured) and generally consisted of a bunch of people sitting together around a table in a stuffy room, poring over dot-matrix print-outs of computer code together, red pens in hand, until they were bleary-eyed and brain-dead. To anyone who thinks of code reviews with a cringe and a shudder, recalling the way they used to be done years ago, the prospect of introducing such a system into your fast-paced Agile workplace can seem like cruel and unusual punishment. But these days, with production cycles getting shorter and shorter, where does one begin? Understanding Code Review After all, would a serious book publisher dare to print thousands of copies of an authorвЂ™s work without first having a team of editors proof and copyedit the manuscript? For the writers and publishers of software, the same logic applies. Taken together, these factors should inspire any development team to consider implementing a smart, strategic code review process if they arenвЂ™t already doing so (especially given the stats). Document review makes it easier for an organization to curate, govern, and manage the lifecycle of digital artifacts beyond the source code. Work environments that encourage programmers to talk with each other about their code tend to foster greater communication and camaraderie, distribute the sense of 'ownership' for any piece of code, and provide an invaluable educational context for junior developers-as senior colleagues demonstrate, through real instances, better ways to write clean code, solve common problems with useful shortcuts, and visually identify any number of potential troublespots, such as memory leaks, buffer overflows, or scalability issues. Reviews can also save money, particularly by catching the types of bugs that might slip undetected through testing, through production, and into the end-usersвЂ™ laptops (whereupon those annoyed customers will issue scathing reviews of your product on Amazon or in the App Store and your sales will suffer accordingly).Д«ut while saving time and money are crucial concerns in the business of software development, code reviews also deliver some additional, more human-centric ROI. When done correctly, peer reviews save time, streamlining the development process upfront and drastically reducing the amount of work required later of QA teams. Whether youвЂ™re a software development manager or a programmer in the trenches, you may be ignoring the tremendous benefits of code reviews, or code inspections, at your own peril.

#Best code review tools manual

But what isnвЂ™t so obvious is why software developers often rely on manual or automated testing to vet their code to the neglect of that other great gift of human nature: the ability to see and correct mistakes ourselves.

To err is, of course, human, so this is an obvious correlation. Software is therefore often riddled with mistakes. There are peer code review tools and software, but the concept itself is important to understand.

Code Review, also known as Peer Code Review, is the act of consciously and systematically convening with oneвЂ™s fellow programmers to check each otherвЂ™s code for mistakes and has been repeatedly shown to accelerate and streamline the process of software development like few other practices can.