Deep Dive: Code review

This is one of our Deep Dive seminars.

Code review is perhaps one of the most widespread engineering practices, yet it very rarely works truly effectively. On most projects, it exists just to check a box and brings little value while taking up the time of everyone involved. The reasons vary: on some projects, code review is handed down by management, and developers aren’t particularly enthusiastic about it; on others, simply no one has the knowledge and experience to organize the review process well; and on still others, bad past experience and constant conflicts over every little thing cancel out all the effort.

In this seminar, we’ll go through the following topics in detail:

• The motivation for using engineering practices
• The concept of code quality and its main components
• The goals of code review and the problems it solves
• Why it does or doesn’t work in real life
• Strategies for choosing a reviewer
• Ways to organize and conduct code review
• Core techniques and useful tips
• Working through common questions and situations
• Using static analysis together with code review
• Formalizing and measuring technical debt
• The main areas of static analysis
• Overview of SonarQube
• Tools for organizing code review
• Overview of Gerrit
• Code review metrics and how they relate to individual and team effectiveness
• Practices for continuously improving effectiveness with metrics
• The specifics of scaling code review on a large project
• Setting up cross-team collaboration

By the end, participants should have a complete, well-rounded understanding of this practice and the specifics of applying it in teams and projects of different sizes.