What to look for in a Code Review?

Software Development
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Let’s talk about code reviews. If you take only a few seconds to search for information about code reviews, you’ll see a lot of articles about why code reviews are a Good Thing (for example, [this post by Jeff Atwood.

You also see a lot of documentation on how to use Code Review tools like our very own [Upsource]

What you don’t see so much of, is a guide to things to look for when you’re reviewing someone else’s code.

Probably the reason there’s no definitive article on what to be looking for is: there are a lot of different things to consider. And, like any other set of requirements (functional or non-functional), individual organisations will have different priorities for each aspect.

Since this is a big topic to cover, the aim of this article is to outline just some of the things a reviewer could be looking out for when performing a code review. Deciding on the priority of each aspect and checking them consistently is a sufficiently complex subject to be an article in its own right.