How to Ensure a Smooth Code Review Process When Your Team Works Remotely
Code review is an integral part of the software development process to identify any bugs at an early stage. Let’s see how to code review effectively when you work remotely.
Recently, the landscape of the modern application development ecosystem has changed a lot. As a result of the Covid-19 outbreak, many brick-and-mortar offices or organizations have been closed for a while. Thus, officers have to complete their work at home every day until governments have controlled the pandemic properly. It leads to software outsourcing services involved in developing, building, and promoting their technological infrastructure.
Working from home is different from making a pivot since you ask your software developers to commit and work remotely. Your software engineer team working remotely will sink into the core of any team, especially communication within the team. In this article, we concentrate on the effectiveness and efficiency of code review while working remotely.
Code review: Definition & Types
Code review definition
Code review, also peers code review, is a software quality assurance process where one or more testers check a program primarily by viewing and reading parts of the source code. Either when programs have been implemented, code review is considered a stopgap measure.
When mentioning code review, we often concentrate on peer review, merge, and pull requests. After code review processes, testers ask software developers to check and evaluate code improvements. Your software developer teams must fix bugs before implementing them in the next phase of the software development lifecycle.
Code reviewers should verify the parameters below:
- Design — whether the code is well-designed or not?
- Naming conventions — Do the software developers use readable names for variables, classes, and approaches for understanding?
- Comments — Are comments clear and meaningful enough?
- Complexity — Can the code be written simply? Is it easier to understand or not?
- Tests — Does the code have correctly crafted automated tests?
Different types of code review
- Formal code review
Formal code review, also known as Fagan inspection, involves a detailed process with many participants and phases. This type of code review is traditional in which software engineers attend a series of meetings and review code step by step. Formal inspections are a thorough process to find defects in the code under review.
2. Lightweight code review
This type of code review requires less overhead than formal code review although it might be equally effective when done. Software engineers often conduct lightweight code reviews as a part of the software development process. Software outsourcing services also use lightweight code reviews during software development.
- Instant code review: the first type of code review often happens during pair programming. Meanwhile, a software developer is hitting the keyboard to write the code, the other reviews that code right on the spot. He will pay attention to specific issues, giving ideas for code improvement on the way of custom software development.
- Synchronous code review (known as over-the-shoulder code review): For this type of code review, developers write code and ask the reviewer for a code review immediately when finished. The testers join developers at their desks and look at the same screen while reviewing and improving the code together.
- Asynchronous code review: As the next type of code review, after coders finish their work, they send the code to the testers for reviewing and start their next task.
- Code review once in a while: One developer is showing and explaining his difficulties during the code writing in the meeting. Meanwhile, other developers are trying to figure out potential problems, commenting and providing suggestions on how to improve the code. In the custom software development process, people usually use this type of code review to make the code work.
What are the benefits of code review?
Ensuring consistency in the design and implementation process
Each software developer has a unique coding style and conducts many different projects. If developers keep following their coding styles in the custom software development, it will hide collaboration and stall progress. Therefore, the code review process forces software developers to follow specific coding practices in the software development phase. It standardizes the source of code, making it easier and convenient for developers to understand easily. The code review process is useful in the long run since developers keep changing projects. Furthermore, following a consistent coding pattern helps future coders spend time developing new features rather than analyzing the existing code. Thus, the benefits of code review help to ensure consistency in the design and implementation process.
Optimizing code for better improvements
Code review helps young developers identify which parts need to improve when coming to code optimization. As young developers are still unaware of different code optimization techniques which help them write code effectively. Coders gain the right comments from the senior developers in the code review process, improving their code writing skills.
Moreover, the code review process helps define mistakes or errors that might lead to big bugs. Even the most skilled developers can make mistakes, the code review process eliminates possible mistakes before proceeding. Optimizing code for better performance is one of the benefits of code review, especially during the custom software development process.
Cooperating and sharing new techniques
Besides saving time and money, code review also provides a human-centric return on investment. The code review process enforces software developers to work together, encouraging them to interact with each other. It also boosts their mutual trust amongst developers. When working in custom software development, coders exchange information regarding new techniques, and technologies during the code review process. It helps upgrade their skills by achieving knowledge of the latest technologies.
Monitoring quality and requirements
Each project has specific scope and requirements. Software developers create unique features regarding projects’ requirements. However, they might misinterpret the requirements, resulting in other developers writing a useless feature. Code review helps handle such circumstances since the process validates any features against expected ones. It ensures that software engineer teams do not miss out on critical features. Finally, monitoring quality and requirements is another benefit of code review.
8 guidelines to make a code review checklist
More importantly than ever, the software developer team stays in touch during work from home. Many tools for your team to stay connected and communicate while not being at the office. The code review process is great generally speaking; however, it might be painful without a good process. Thus, having a great code review checklist is essential. A good code review checklist helps ensure the productivity of the code review process. It helps prevent simple mistakes and improve the developer’s performance.
Pull request — Is the pull request ready for review?
Here are some main principles that apply to the code review process. It’s essential for software developers to focus on, especially during custom software development.
- Frequent — To make pull requests manageable and controllable, then submit them. If a pull request happens numerous days without any reason software developers should split it into smaller parts.
- Bitesize — If a pull request is too big, it is hard to understand. Thus, coders should break this pull request into small pieces as much as possible.
- Well-documented — Whether the pull request has enough information for coders to understand or not.
- Following a specific responsibility principle — A piece of code should solve a single problem. If it affects the rest of the code, it is hard for testers to review.
Styling
The software development team lead sets some standardized styling rules for team members and ensures they follow the rules. Consistent code styling helps ensure future software engineers understand code easily and work effectively. For example, are variable names consistently capitalized? Or are there enough descriptive comments in the code review process? In the project of software outsourcing service companies, you can check these rules followed by an automatic code linter, and Prettier is an example.
Security
Amongst many code review checklists, setting security standards for projects is another thing. Setting security rules for the code review process will depend on the project and organization. If your team defines security problems in the code review process, speak to the contributor. Here are some best practices that your team should know:
- Implement your project through scanning solutions, for example, LGTM.
- Don’t write hard-coded credentials or have secrets in the code source.
- Don’t release too much information in the error messages, giving hints to an attacker.
- Make sure any database queries should be parameterized.
- Don’t rely too much on users or client inputs since clients or web applications can be defined.
Performance
Your team must identify optimizations that can improve performance. You might wonder if there is any debug that can be removed? Or are images properly compressed? Some code review tools can help optimize the web performance such as Chrome Lighthouse and DebugBear, etc.
Testing
Testing is another step of the code review checklist that you might be concerned about. Tests automatically check which code it should be, making it an essential part of the code review process. In the custom software development process, tests might include the following things:
- Firstly, reviewers check whether tests are present and well-documented for all functionalities or not. If some of them are not covered by testing, it must be well-documented.
- Secondly, ensure that tests should be isolated from others, thus you can easily find the problems if tests fail.
- Finally, does the code work?
For example, Jest is a good choice if you are looking for automated unit testing. Regardless of automated end-to-end tests, please you can use Cypress and Reflect.
Does it work?
We have made assumptions about how the code works? If you are on an agile team, testers always check whether the code meets the criteria provided by the Product Manager. If it doesn’t meet any criteria, ask the contributing software developers.
Another thing is that code works locally yet doesn’t work in production. So you must ensure your testers review all code in a staging environment that is consistent with your production environment. In software outsourcing services, the stage is quite important for the performance of the whole team.
Positive code review suggestion
Before sending the code review to software developers in your team, make sure that your comments help improve performance rather than criticize.
Review the checklist regularly and constantly
Code review checklist can work if it’s up-to-date every day. That’s why it’s important to review your checklist continually and code review checklists, ensuring it meets the needs.
Top 9 code review best practices while working from home
Let’s check out the top code review best practices for boosting the team’s productivity. Each team will have a different code review process, so it is a method that needs changes depending on the different projects and members involved. For custom software development projects, code review best practices are essential, especially during WFH.
Setting goals and standards in the code review process
Before starting a code review process, it’s important to decide which metrics your team uses and define goals for the projects. The goals might include acceptable standards for coding within the company. Setting goals and standards is one of the things to do for the best code review practices. It ensures custom software development projects follow company standards.
Communicating goals and expectations to your team members
Next in the code review best practices process, you should communicate with others regardless of goals and expectations in the projects. If you don’t convey the goals and expectations, that might result in ambiguity regarding the team performance and final results. For software outsourcing services, conveying goals and possible outcomes is essential.
Defining a feasible code review process
After setting and conveying the goals and expectations, it is time to define a code review process for projects. It will help team members stay on track and reduce time on technical debt.
Making use of a code view checklist
Code review best practices support team performance while delivering software outsourcing services using a code review checklist. It ensures the code works well.
Annotating source code before reviewing
An annotation is a tool in the custom software development cycle and for the reviewers. It helps reviewers read and understand the code better in the code review process. Thus, it is essential to encourage software developers to add annotations while writing code but don’t overdo it. Annotating source code before reviewing is the next code review best practice for all software developers.
Limited time: no more than 60 minutes at once
People can not perform work effectively if they work continuously for hours without taking a break. So it doesn’t bring productivity for reviewers when they review for over an hour. So the code review can work best within 60 minutes.
Establishing a process for fixing bugs
Fixing the defects in the code review process is a final goal. Having a good code review process to fix bugs ensures it is the most effective approach to get the code review best practices.
Fostering a positive code review culture
In many firms, the code review helps evaluate the software developers’ performance. However, the code review process is more than evaluating the performance of coders. It helps create an environment of learning. Rather than pointing out the mistakes, the code review makes them learn how to solve the problems and work together.
Saving time
Finally, saving time is one of the code review best practices, especially in software outsourcing services. Automated code review tools such as Codegrip are great options for many custom software development companies. The code review can scan the codebase and find defects and provide possible solutions to fix them.
The best code review tools for software developers
Collaborator — The most comprehensive code review tools
When the code quality is critical, Collaborator allows for code change views, defects errors, set review rules, and automatic notification to complete reviews. This code review tool can integrate with 11 different SCMs, IDEs such as Eclipse and Visual Studio. Thus, Collaborator is also a great code review example for coders and reviewers to enhance their performance.
Codebrag
Codebrag is a simple, and open-source code review tool to solve non-blocking code reviews and smart email notifications, etc. It helps deliver enhanced software using the agile code review methodology.
Gerrit
It is a free web-based code review tool for approving or disapproving the changes in code. Besides, this code review tool can integrate with Git, providing repository management for Git. Gerrit is a code review example for any software developer since it is suitable for discussing detailed code changes.
JArchitect
A code review tool is a great option for analyzing Java code. After reviewing codes, it surrenders as a detailed report of the custom software development. JArchitect is compatible with CRMs, OS systems, and plugins.
Rhodecode
Rhodecode is an open source for incorporated enterprise software that integrates hold Git, Subversion, and Mercurial. This code review tool allows the team to collaborate, manage and code security. Moreover, Rhodecode has two editions regardless of Community Edition (EC) which is free and open and Enterprise Edition (EE) licensed for each user.
How to code review when custom software development team WFH?
Since the covid-19 outbreak, most custom software development firms work from home. Regardless of the code review, as a team leads, you might do something to ensure a productive workflow, leading to positive code review practices. Most importantly, communication is in every workflow, making the code review active and enhancing other teams working on the same component. There are several fundamental stages that your custom software development team should follow:
- Give a fresh and positive code review using the help of a git-based code review tool.
- Document: This stage of the code review process provides software developers with extensive information such as diagrams and video links.
- Collaborate: Look through the intricacies of the code review process via screen sharing or even several team-based tools.
- Adapt: The code review will be based on the feedback ladder and make feasible changes.
- Merge: Finally, the team will complete the code review process by merging the following files.
Final thoughts
Code review has been a reliable code quality practice for any software developer in the past few years. It will grow in the future. If you are looking for any top-tanked custom software development firms in Vietnam or software outsourcing services, we will tell you the same.
More content at PlainEnglish.io. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Join our community Discord.
