Most recently I had to ‘plan’ a code review. Since our client will be actually reviwing our codes its always better for us engineers to review our own work. Ideally a code review is not something which you would do after doing everything, but it has to be a part and parcel of our daily builds, so that the released codes are always complying to inhouse and other Industry best practices. In XP (Extreme Programming) ‘Pair Programming’ is introduced to to take advantage of code review, although its one such advantage of Pair Programming.
First thing I wanted to do before starting a code review was to know ‘Why am I doing this ?’ ‘What are my goals ?’ ‘How do we plan a code review ?’
Since we are doing the review after a long elapsed time period, we also needed a plan.
One of the Main reasons behind this code review is to look for windows of opportunity to improve overall application performance. To identify potential bottlenecks. Refactoring opportunities will also arriese as and when we go about doing this. I wanted a starting point and Ideally it’s a Checklist.
Also there are numerous tools to help you identify gray areas in your code. Sourcemonitor is one such tool which is also a free download.
