Importance of Code Reviews

Code reviews are an important part of the software development process. They are the period during development where a more senior team member reviews the code written by another team member, prior to submission into a companies version control system. Code reviews are a formal process to both improve the quality of submitted code, as well as to allow for mentoring of all developers on the team.

Any time a piece of code is being submitted for eventual inclusion in an application, a code review should be part of the process prior to formal inclusion. This ensures that a minimum of two people review all changes to the software to check for defects. This code review process also ensures that knowledge is duplicated within the enterprise to better manage project transition and long term support responsibilities for all applications.

There are several primary areas that should be of focus for all code reviews:

Company Coding Standards
All companies should have standards for software development. These should include the libraries used during development, the documentation of the code base and the languages used for development. This is the first item that should be reviewed during all code reviews. By reviewing all code for adherence to company standards, it ensures all team members not only follow the standards, but have a chance to learn any standards that they may not be aware of or that may have changed.

Company Enterprise Architecture Standards
In addition to company coding standards, all firms should have a formal set of Enterprise Architecture (EA) standards. These often include how data is stored, managed, tagged, backed up and secured during transport and manipulation. All code reviews should ensure that new code being submitted follows existing company EA standards for ease of interoperability, as well as long term software life cycle management.

Mentoring
Mentoring is a key component of all code reviews. Code reviews allow senior staff to review code of their teammates, and provide them suggestions for improvement based on experience. This mentoring is key to ensuring better long term quality from all produced code, as well as for providing staff a path for development. Each staff member that is having their code reviewed could potentially be reviewing code in the future, so it is key that this mentoring process be official, and an important part of the software development teams culture.

Security
In today's IT environments, security is a critical component of software development. All code reviews should include a portion of time for reviewing security to ensure that input and variables are handled securely, that temp data is cleaned up properly and that host to host communication is handled in a secure fashion, just to name a few.

Security is a complex topic, especially in the software development arena because of the wide range of attacks, challenges and threats. Code reviews allow for a formal process to ensure common mistakes are not made, previous mistakes are not made again and that staff have a forum for discussion of implementation details.

Scalability
Today, many applications are scaling to levels of usage never first envisioned when the application was written. This causes many problems for both the administrators of these applications, as well as the users. Code reviews should ensure that applications are properly handling resources like CPU time, system memory and disk bandwidth as to allow the application to properly scale over time. Scalability is a combination of many components, both the responsibility of the developer and other IT administrators; code reviews should ensure that all code written is properly prepared to scale over time and handle even the most extreme loads on the system.

Coding Quality
Ultimately, the final key of all code reviews is ensuring quality. Quality can come from many aspects of the code base including documentation, ease of understanding of the code and the maintainability of the code. These are all key aspects that if properly addressed and corrected during code reviews can ensure not only better developers, but more manageable code over time.


Code reviews are an important process component for all companies developing software, either for internal use or external sale. Code reviews ensure that staff are formally mentored on the code they contribute, allowing them to increase their skills and experience as developers and become more valuable to the organization over time. A side effect of this mentoring is higher quality code submissions, with fewer defects and better long term manageability of the code base.