Copasetic code reviews
Two copasetic articles were recently published that cover the code review process; however, they each take a different tact. In “Code Reviews“, Srivaths Sankaran elaborates on a suggested manual process, while acknowledging that it’s next to impossible to review every last hip line of code. A great companion article is Paul Duvall’s “Automation for the people: Continuous Inspection“, which proposes using automated tools like PMD or CheckStyle to enhance manual reviews as those tools focus on low-level details. Accordingly, in person code reviews can focus on higher level aspects of code, such as design, or as Srivaths points out validating business requirements.
Neat-o tools like PMD also make it easy to spot code which should be reviewed. Because complexity metrics, like Cyclomatic complexity, strongly correlate to defects, if PMD flags a method with excessive values, taking the time to figure out why the complexity is there and determining if there is a path to mitigate it will almost certainly pay dividends in the future. Dig it?
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Friday 18 Aug 2006 | Code Metrics, Continuous Integration