A curated list of tools, articles, books, and any other resource related to code review
Code review is the systematic examination (sometimes referred to as peer review) of computer source code.
- An experiment to assess the cost-benefits of code inspections in large scale software development (Porter, Siy, Toman & Votta, 1997) Early paper that tested a range of then current review techniques including multi-stage review and code-review-via-meeting that found you can get most of the benefit in an offline, single pass, with two reviewers.
- Anywhere, anytime code inspections: using the Web to remove inspection bottlenecks in large-scale software development (Perpich, Perry, Porter, Votta & Wade, 1997) One day in the far future the best way to review code witll be on the world wide web.
- Design and Code Inspections to Reduce Errors in Program Development (Fagan, 2002) Using a more formal process, particulary with defined roles for each participant and drive a big increase in error detection during review.
- Helping Developers Help Themselves: Automatic Decomposition of Code Review Changes (Barnett et al. 2015) (summary on the morning paper) Research into automatically splitting big diffs into smaller diffs leading to better reviews.
- Work Practices and Challenges in Pull-Based Development (Gousios et al. 2015) (summary on the morning paper) Field study of how GitHub pull requests are used in the wild.
- Brian Guthrie's Feature Branching Rant Twitter thread on the pros and cons of GitHub's open source first model with regards to "in-company" code review practice.
- Building an Inclusive Code Review Culture Guidelines to help ensure a collaborative and learning culture
- Code Reviews: Just Do It Seminal post advocating for peer review of software back in 2006.
- Code Review Review is the Manager's Job Why management should ensure code review is done and done well.
- Designing Awesome Code Reviews Principles for actively designing a code review process.
- Effective Code Reviews Without the Pain Another 2006 classic on how to effectively perform a code review.
- How I review code More personal advice on how to best review a pull request from an engineer at Tumblr.
- Pull Requests: How to Get and Give Good Feedback Advice for both sides of the code review process, the reviewer and the reviewee.
- Ship Small Diffs Why it's better to review small changes rather than large ones.
- The Art of Humanizing Pull Requests Emoji rich guide to the human side of code review via pull requests.
- Towards Productive Technical Discussions Tactical questions and actions to push code review discussions into more productive territory.
- Unlearning Toxic Behaviors in a Code Review Culture A how-to guide for pull requests via how-not-too.
- Why I changed the way I think about Code Quality Why code quality is about more than just the code.
- Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review Older compliation of 10 essays on the practice of code reviews. Some repetition due to different authors covering the same territory.
- Handbook of Walkthroughs, Inspections, and Technical Reviews Older book covering more formal walkthroughs but covers politics and group dynamics in review well.
- Peer Reviews in Software: A Practical Guide A practical guide to formal code inspections as a code review practice.
- Software Inspection: An Industry Best Practice Compendium of papers on code review practice.
- Ultimate Guide to Code Reviews Codacy sponsored ebook of code review practices based on developer survey.
- What to Look for in a Code Review JetBrains sponsored ebook of how to spot coding anti-patterns during review.
- Code Reviews: Honesty, Kindness, Inspiration: Pick Three - Jacob Stoebel RubyConf 2017 How to do effective code review while remaining kind to the original author.
- Goldilocks and the Three Code Reviews - Vaidehi Joshi RedDot Ruby Conf 2017 Finding just the right amount of code review by focussing on what is effecting.
- Implementing a Strong Code-Review Culture - Derek Prior Railsconf 2015 How to instill a healthy code review culture in a team.
- Crucible Atlassian's on-premise code review tool.
- Gerrit Open source git code review tool originating out of Google.
- Github Git hosting and pioneer of the "Pull Request".
- LGTM Automated Git code review for GitHub and Bitbucket pull requests for finding security vulnerabilities and code quality issues.
- Phabricator Open source git/mercurial/svn code review tool originating out of Facebook.
- Reviewable Code review tool built on top of Github Pull Requests.
- Review Board Open source review tool that is SCM/platform neutral.
- Rubberduck Browser extension to adds code-aware navigation to GitHub pull requests.
- Upsource JetBrain's on-premise git/mercurial/perforce/svn code review tool.
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