My Code Review Experience

My software engineering class implemented a code review over the past week, to help each of the pairs get feedback on our implementation of the WattDepot command line interface. A code review is a systematic examination of source code intended to find mistakes overlooked in the development phase; it improves both the overall quality of the code, and the skills of all developers involved in the review.

I was assigned to review two other systems. In doing this reviewing, I noticed several things that could be implemented or improved in my own system. For instance, I found a way to break one system (by putting in an incorrectly formatted timestamp), and I knew that the error was not caught in my own implementation. I also found more efficient ways to do things, such as creating a method to check that a timestamp was correctly created, since this is something that almost every method executing a command requires.

On the side of the coder whose system was reviewed, I received good feedback from all four of the reviewers. The basic message from all of them was that the code that was already written was good, with a few minor things to fix, and that mostly we needed to continue working on the code to implement test cases or to refine error messages. I also got some good feedback on errors that we need to catch because they currently cause the system to stop working properly.

Overall, this code review gave me a lot of ideas on things that we can improve in our system, and I think that we'll be doing a lot of improvement in the next five days before version 2.0 of our system is due.