What are the most effective code review practices for different contexts?

3 Development stage

The stage of your development cycle can also influence how you perform code reviews, as it affects the urgency, the priority, and the expectations of the reviews. For early stages, such as prototyping or experimentation, you may want to use a fast and flexible approach, such as peer feedback, where you solicit comments and suggestions from your peers without formal approval. For later stages, such as testing or deployment, you may want to use a rigorous and thorough approach, such as code inspection, where you follow a predefined checklist and criteria to verify the quality and correctness of the code.

4 Review goals

The goals of your code review can significantly affect how you conduct it, as they define the purpose, the focus, and the expected outcome. For instance, if you want to improve code quality, you should focus on readability, maintainability and consistency while using linters, formatters and analyzers. If you want to catch bugs, you should look into the functionality, logic and edge cases while using tests, debuggers and logs. If the goal is to share knowledge, then context, rationale and best practices should be prioritized with comments, documentation and tutorials. Finally, if your goal is to foster collaboration, then feedback, communication and culture should be the main focus with chat, video and emoji.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?