Ultimate Code Review Blog Post Series

Ultimate Code Review Blog Post Series

In this code review blog post series, I share my experiences and lessons learned about code reviewing working with several teams at Microsoft. Primarily, I show you code reviewing best practices to boost your code quality. But, you also learn which pitfalls to avoid while performing code reviewing.

The foundation of those code review blog posts is my experience analyzing and improving code review practices and tooling at Microsoft. I worked with hundreds of engineers and analysed thousands of code reviews. You can see this code review blog post series as an intense crash course to learn about code reviewing best practices.

Code review overview

Code reviewing is a widely adopted and adapted engineering practice. Its main aim is to improve software quality. In addition, sharing knowledge among team members is another important benefit of code reviewing.

Even though code reviewing provides several other benefits, you have to be aware to follow best practices. Otherwise, you might tap into several pitfalls.

Microsoft’s code review process

I have been working at Microsoft as a software engineer and researcher for several years. My main focus was to analyze and improve engineering practices and tools. One of the key areas I focused on was code reviewing.

In this blog series, I am going to share the key insights and lessons learned about code reviewing at Microsoft. All of them are backed by research and are grounded in actual experiences and knowledge from high performing engineering teams. At Microsoft, I performed several large-scale studies involving thousands of engineers and millions of code review comments. The lessons learned presented in this code review blog post series are derived from those empirical studies.

Blog post series

The series consists of 10 blog posts. You can read each one of them separately. Still, you might get the best out of it reading it consecutively.

In the coming weeks, I will post about:

  1. Code Reviews at Microsoft: How Do Code Reviews Work at one of the Largest Software Companies?
    In this post, I explain how a common review process looks like at Microsoft, and which code review tool is mostly used at Microsoft.
  2. Code review pitfalls: learn which problems slow your team down
    In this post, I deep dive into the main code review pitfalls teams face when practicing code reviews.
  3. Proven Code Review Best Practices
    Learn all proven code review best practices that high-performing teams at Microsoft use to have fast turn-around times and get great feedback.
  4. How to give great code review feedback
    The benefits of code reviews rise and fall with the quality of the code review feedback. This post deep dives into a study at Microsoft that analyzed over 1.5 million code review comments to find out which feedback actually helps to improve the code.
  5. Code Reviews at Google Code reviews at Google are lightweight and fast. Actually, code reviews are completed in under 5 hours. That's much faster than for most other large software companies. In this post, I show you why.
  6. Code review trade-offs
    Even if you are aware of all best practices, there are several trade-offs you have to keep in mind. For example, do you favor review speed or review rigor? In this article, I dive into this topic.
  7. How to give useful code review comments?
    Not every review comment turns out useful. Comments that are not useful should be avoided. In this article, I explain what really makes for a useful comment.
  8. Code Review Checklist
    If you want to boost your productivity and your rigor at the same time, a code review checklist is what you are after. This one is also downloadable.
  9. Wrap-up post

Don’t miss out on any of the posts of this code review blog post series by following me on Twitter.