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Ask HN: How do you do code review, if at all?

7 pointsby goralphalmost 10 years ago
If you do, what&#x27;s your process? Pre-commit, post-commit? How many devs need to review a change set? Which service do you use?<p>If you don&#x27;t, why not? Have you thought about starting? What&#x27;s blocking your team if so?

6 comments

ukomsalmost 10 years ago
In company I work, we&#x27;ve developed through years quite complex code review. First of all - we&#x27;re programming in Perl 5.21 and because of this we made coding standards to ensure people will code in simmilar manner. Second - we have mailing list where summary of all commits is send - code, reason, project description etc. Every developer is allowed to read those commits and if he find anything suspicious - he can rand code check (or wtf) message and authour of questioned code has to respond (either by correcting his code or explaining why he did what he did). Third - we do partial reviews during project. Whenever sprint is finished - there goes minireview. Fourth - after project is finished - there is inner team project code review, where developers take step back and look themselves on their and theirs teammates code. Fifth - when inner-team review is finished and all issues are fixed - there is outer-team review. Senior Engineer or Software Architect is appointed to overview whole code, but at this point any developer from any team is allowed to join outer-team review.<p>Leading reviewer after finishing his work decide about eventual after-fix review (if something was really messed up despite all precautions).<p>And - just for sure - before releasing code to production releasing architect take quick eye look on git diff. If nothing sting him on his eye - code is like Dobby - free!
why-elalmost 10 years ago
Only one reviewer is enough for us. Once a PR is submitted to GitHub, it should be merged by the reviewer, who usually only has to click that GitHub merge button. This means we favor a rebase-workflow, which has worked great for us.<p>There are two cases in which we bypass this mechanism. One is hot-fixes that can&#x27;t afford to go through this process, and the other is changes too trivial to wait for a reviewer. This later case is rare, since there is always a reviewer, but we do have some remote colleagues (Australia, SF) who should use their judgment in deciding whether a PR is worth being reviewed. This is slightly subjective but so far all decisions in this regard were excellent. Once the team is bigger perhaps we&#x27;d do away with this and keep hot-fixes as the only review-by-passers.
SamReidHughesalmost 10 years ago
Exactly one developer should be responsible for a review. Otherwise, you get diffusion of responsibility, and both reviewers assume they can half-ass things. Also, even if they were diligent, you&#x27;re needlessly creating work for yourself, and the marginal benefit of the second reviewer is very small. Having two reviewers is okay if you give them non-overlapping parts of the code to review.<p>You should definitely do code reviews. Their main benefit is in the long-term improvement in coding quality and coding ability of your team members.
marpstaralmost 10 years ago
Pre-commit code reviews are usually ad hoc for us. Simpler changes may undergo no review while larger refactors are almost always reviewed with multiple people.<p>At the very least, about 2&#x2F;3 of the way through the coding process, we again go through the code and make sure to identify ways we&#x27;re deviating from the intended design. This gives us a bit of time to correct any issues and retest everything before moving on.<p>We just use TFS.
theaccordancealmost 10 years ago
Our code review process:<p>- starts as a pull request (we use git-flow strategy)<p>- Pull request is announced in our team slack channel via integration<p>- 2 devs must sign off before merge; 3 if branch is from our outsourced team in India.<p>- Github project wiki contains an outline of the type of criteria to keep an eye out for, mostly syntax &amp; patterns not caught by our linter config<p>- All feedback is considered optional<p>- Devs are encouraged to take conversations offline if a comment thread takes off on a particular item<p>- Team leader handles the merge after devs signoff on PR
voradoralmost 10 years ago
At Nylas we use Phabricator (which I heartily recommend) for code reviews. Generally we have two reviewers, one is responsible for the review and the other one tries to notice things the other reviewer hasn&#x27;t found.