Code Reviews

Code Review is the act of consciously and systematically convening with one’s fellow programmers to check each other’s code for mistakes, and has been repeatedly shown to accelerate and streamline the process of software development like few other practices can.

Here's the flow. Read our protocols for the process.

Best Practices

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/11-proven-practices-for-peer-review/

https://nyu-cds.github.io/effective-code-reviews/02-best-practices/

Process

1. Create a local feature branch based off develop.
2. When feature is complete and tests pass, stage the changes.
3. When you've staged the changes, commit them.
4. Write a good commit message.
5. Push your branch.
6. Submit a GitHub pull request.
7. Ask for a code review in Slack.
8. A team member other than the author reviews the pull request. They follow Code Review guidelines to avoid miscommunication.
9. They make comments and ask questions directly on lines of code in the Bitbucket/Github web interface or in Slack.
10. When satisfied, they approve the pull request, if is the second approve, then merge it.
11. Rebase interactively. Squash commits like "Fix whitespace" into one or a small number of valuable commit(s). Edit commit messages to reveal intent.
12. View a list of new commits. View changed files. Merge branch into develop.
13. Delete your remote feature branch.
14. Delete your local feature branch.

Code reviews that happen right before code goes into master offer similar benefits:

• The whole team learns about new code as it is written.
• Mistakes are caught earlier.
• Coding standards are more likely to be established, discussed, and followed.
• Feedback from this style of code review is far more likely to be applied.
• No one forgets context ("Why did we write this?") since it's fresh in the author's mind.