I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting

You see, most issues that come from the review aren’t that hard to understand.

The code I’d like to discuss are the ones that show a good solution. Parts of code that deserve a good refactor are my favourite. Ofcourse bugs need to be shown aswell, but mostly this is pretty straightforward.

I’d like to ask you: to your experience how do you organize code review meetings and how do you choose code for review?

Alexander

Big problems we’ve found were a multi-threading issue (Spring PropertyEditor used as a singleton), clear copy pastes, hard-coded id’s refering to database records and some wrong bind-validation-save order (actually validation during binding). I actually believe it’s very hard for a code reviewer to actually spot bugs.

Therefor I focussed my efforts more into getting cleaner code. Using refactoring and strict code style (not absurd strict, but strict to applying simple guides), I wanted to created clearer code that would require less work when maintaining.

I’ve actually find plenty of great examples for good refactoring. I especially love what I’ve learned from reading halve of Refactoring by Martin Fowler (http://martinfowler.com/books.html). Invaluable book if you ask me.

@Derik Whittaker
Great posts! Too bad I didn’t find them 2 weeks ago. Probably wouldn’t have writting this post

@intelligencenetworks
It’s true that developers are blind sometimes to bug they wrote. Keeping the checklist is not to help solve a bug. It’s to find bugs you’ve missed, to keep the code clear so other people will spot bugs very easily and to make it easiery to actually fix a bug in the future.

Keeping the code style about the same, decreases the treshold for other developers to read your code.

But sometimes (I know) you’re blind to your own mistakes, so you keep searching hours for the one bug and don’t find it, while somebody else would find it within five minutes.

I recently posted about this subject as well. You can find those posts here
http://devlicio.us/blogs/derik_whittaker/archive/2007/06/12/code-reviews-rules-of-the-game.aspx
http://devlicio.us/blogs/derik_whittaker/archive/2007/06/11/code-reviews-how-to-be-successful.aspx

from what ive seen some errors are just a matter of style, for example should we use multi-ifs for string or should we first convert strings to int/enum and use switch? i remember reading the post when some guy believed that using while with iterator is a bug(i use for, but i have no problem with while).

Good post and i agree with you.

Thanks
Prashant