A lot of these principles were taught to me when I worked at Cisco Systems many years ago, and I am a big supporter of code reviews, having seen their effects first-hand.
One downside with conducting "formalised sit-down" code reviews is the requirement to physically get people around a table, which I know from experience becomes a big hurdle for development teams.
I developed Codestriker, which is an open-sourced web-based code reviewing system, to get around this hurdle (and the use of paper/print-outs). Reviewers create a new code review, via a web-based interface, and emails are sent to all participants.
Using Codestriker for your reviews minimizes paper work, ensures that issues, comments and decisions are recorded in a database, and provides a comfortable workspace for actually performing code inspections.
It also means that developers are free to review the code on their own time, and also they don't have to be physically located at the same place.
Topics can also be created automatically on CVS check-ins too.
There are other tools out there which assist in code reviews, which this article perhaps could have highlighted further. In any case, the codestriker home page is located here:
http://codestriker.sourceforge.net
The "resources" link also refers to other systems. |
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