Caffeinated Coder

Having a second set of eyes on your code has multiple benefits.

Besides increasing the odds of catching bugs earlier in the process when they are less expensive to fix, code reviews tend to yield higher quality code that is more maintainable because you get feedback from someone who has not been immersed in the code and thus does not suffer from the blind spots that can be caused by working on something for too long.

It also leads to greater cross training in the code base (the hit by a bus factor) as well as knowledge sharing about coding practices in general. I’ve learned a lot of new techniques by simply reading code written by my co-workers.

Unfortunately, regular code reviews seem to be a rare practice in the industry because they are expensive in terms of time and difficult to manage due to egos. Most developers are very sensitive about the code they write and therefore it’s difficult to offer criticism without it being interpreted as a personal attack.

Even if reviews are built into a software shop’s SDLC, code reviews are often viewed as an ancillary activity and thus are usually first to be cut once a deadline looms (which is pretty much all the time in my experience).

Pair programming is one popular way to tackle this problem. It has all the benefits of code review, but bypasses the emotional issues by turning the review into a collaborative exercise. It also makes reviews more likely to happen because it becomes intertwined with the development process.

Although I clearly see the conceptual benefits of pair programming, I must admit that I am never very excited to participate in pair programming sessions on a regular basis. It’s probably just due to my introverted nature, but I feel most productive when I am in “the zone” and I can never seem to attain that state unless I am alone and in an environment with few distractions.

An alternative approach to pair programming that still makes the code review process inexpensive, stress free, and an integral part of the development process is to make it a required step of the development workflow and then adopt tools that make the process quick and painless to perform.

If code review happens all the time, then it ceases to be a stressful activity. If review is a required step before testing can occur (e.g. a step in the deployment script queries the issue tracking system and stops the deployment process if any unreviewed issues are returned), then it is no longer ancillary and avoidable. If tools help make it a frictionless process then it won’t be an undue burden that kills productivity.

I think we’ve achieved a relatively frictionless review process at StoreFinancial with the help of JIRA, Fisheye, TortoiseSVN, and a SVN hook.

First we ensure that a valid Jira key is entered into the comment field of the TortoiseSVN commit window with the help of a custom pre-commit hook that queries Jira to verify that the issue exists and is in an opened or resolved state before allowing the commit. I’ll describe how I did the hook in my next post and provide the source code.

If a developer forgets to enter the key or fat fingers the entry, then the code commit fails.

We originally purchased Fisheye to allow fast and sophisticated source control searching, but by far the biggest benefit we gained was the automatic association that happens between source code files and JIRA issues and the ability to view code directly in the browser. Within seconds of doing a commit, links to source control files will show up on a tab of the issue.

This allows the reviewer (in our case whoever finishes their developer tasks first) to grab an issue and quickly review it by simply clicking on the diff links of the Fisheye tab. The color coding scheme makes changes easy to see and the fact that it is within the browser minimizes the number of clicks required to do the reviews.

After reviewing all the files associated with the issue, the review can either mark the issue as reviewed or reopen it with comments and reassign it to the original developer to make the changes.

There are still parts of the code review process that I would like to streamline more.

In particular, I don’t like being a code formatting nazi so I’d like to move to shared ReSharper templates that automatically enforce formatting and syntax standards.

Otherwise, I’m quite pleased with the current state of our process and tools. With the addition of some simple tools it went from being expensive drudgery to being an relatively painless and valuable part of the development process.

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