The Code Review Checklist

Early in my career as a developer, I was required to follow a formal process to get the code I'd written deployed to production environments. Each time I'd written code, I had to document what I'd tested and then print out the relevant sections of the codebase. I needed to find two other developers to spend 10-15 minutes with me in a meeting, going over my code, each of us with our own paper copy. Almost like a dissertation, I had to answer questions and defend my work, with problems being marked on paper for me to go fix. Over time, I learned that different developers reviewed code in different ways. Some spent more time on standards and formatting. Naming and the visual structure were more important to them, so if I wasn't confident in my work, I'd pick them and spend time ensuring the formatting was correct. Or sometimes, I'd mis-format it, so they would tell me to go fix that and not look at what the code actually did. Others were better at examining algorithms, and I often used them to help me learn, with them digging into my logic and helping me understand whether I'd included enough error handling, considered edge cases, or written code that performed well. Read the rest of The Code Review Checklist