In the Line of Fire -- Ramblings of the incoherent mind

One wonders ....Why in the name of God would one want to spend (waste as some people say) time on performing a code review on any piece of code which we/peers have written and seems to be working properly and providing the functionality

I remember back then when i was an intern and i was assigned to a project in which my PM was a guy working in our US branch...people having worked with US bosses might be knowing thr are 2 types of techies our there... one who have less knowledge than you and the other lot who has so much knowledge than you that they make you feel like you are learning the alphabets of development while they are shooting out complex phrases after phrases of sentences....

man how i hated that guy i can still recall his words "Shounak, Dont even show me the functionality i dont care about it, first make sure you have it as per the coding standards" and i used to think what kind of a weirdo have i got as my boss ..he doesn't even want to see if the requirement has been met but cares about some stupid code review.....and i used to laugh at his code review obsession...

but over the years as i grew into a techie...into what they call a seasoned developer ..i realised the importance of code review

Code review isnt a tool to find mistakes in others code...its a tool by which one ensures the code is going to meet the standards expected of a seasoned developer.

There are various technical ways of achieving our requirements...or rather let me put it this way there are abundant ways of screwing up the way you meet your requirement.and there are some ways in which you meet the requirement in one of the optimum ways...and code review is a tool that helps us walk on the optimum path or close to the optimum path...

for an example check my post on string builder usage vs string concat... at String Builder Vs String concat/

Code reviews are important for a developer to understand how to keep improving his coding style ..

there are various good tools used for having automated code checking one that i have used extensively in my development days is FxCop and one more that i can't recall the name of...these were tools which would use the assembly n metadata as source and parse the assembly for any coding style /optimization errors

will try and write up about one of them soon

Cheers

© Shounak Pandit