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Code review best practices (expand)

⁠

Code review⁠

(sometimes referred to as

peer review⁠

) is a

software quality assurance⁠

activity in which one or several humans check a

program⁠

mainly by viewing and reading parts of its

source code⁠

, and they do so after implementation or as an interruption of implementation. At least one of the humans must not be the code's author. The humans performing the checking, excluding the author, are called "reviewers".

The historically first code review process that was studied and described in detail was called "Inspection" by its inventor

Michael Fagan⁠

. This

Fagan inspection⁠

is a formal process which involves a careful and detailed execution with multiple participants and multiple phases. Formal code reviews are the traditional method of review, in which

software developers⁠

attend a series of meetings and review code line by line, usually using printed copies of the material. Formal inspections are extremely thorough and have been proven effective at finding defects in the code under review.

An important byproduct of a properly conducted formal code review is a written record describing:

Who: Names of those involved in the Review.

When: Date and time the Review was conducted.

Why: Best-Practice, Error Detection, Vulnerability Exposure, Malware Discovery or a combination.

What: Name of the class, method, or program, plus line ranges and other particulars specific to the reviewed code.

Result: What was disclosed during the course of the Review.

⁠

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