RE: the glory of code review

This might all be really obvious, but perhaps it is worth relaying our experience with code reviews...   We found it helpful to put together a brief list of points on exactly what the code review is trying to achieve on top of the usual coding standards compliance. A simple checklist of things to look out for has been helpful for us, and particularly for new joiners. It has also made clear what is out of scope, e.g. are we just looking for obvious bugs, or should we be doing more than that? Should we be questioning higher-level design decisions in a code review, or should that be left to for another mechanism, e.g. a mailing list?   I guess it depends on what you are trying to gain, trading off against effort required. At least with them written down, potential reviewers won't spend time doing stuff that was not really being asked for anyway because of whatever notion of code review they hold. We tried not to be afraid of changing our list in order to get an optimal gain/effort balance. We also made clear it was a guide, not a mandate, since it often varies a lot depending on the problem domain / criticality / expected lifetime of the code under review.   Kieron
From: Dean Wampler <deanwampler@gmail.com> [mailto:Dean Wampler <deanwampler@gmail.com>]
Sent: 02 November 2009 22:38
To: scala-internals@listes.epfl.ch
Cc: martin odersky <martin.odersky@epfl.ch>; David Pollak <feeder.of.the.bears@gmail.com>; Lex Spoon <lex@lexspoon.org>; Paul Phillips <paulp@improving.org>
Subject: Re: [scala-internals] the glory of code review

There are probably a number of people, like me, who haven't contributed code yet, but would be happy to get involved as reviewers. In particular, it would be a great way to learn the internals better. 
Of course, it might be easier to start with libraries and work up to hairy compiler bits...
dean

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