Best Kept Secrets of Code Reviews

The folks over at SmartBear software have written a nice little book entitled The Best Kept Secrets of Code Reviews. It's free if you go over to their webpage and ask for it (you have to fill out a registration form, and it takes a few weeks to arrive, but they havent spammed me at all since I registered with them a few months ago).

This is a pretty good book and it is VERY pragmatic! It is applicable to Agile development too! [You don't have to do Pair-Programming to be Agile! Pairing is part of XP, which is one particular agile method -- several other agile methods do not require it.]

SmartBear also has a pretty neat suite of tools that look to me like they would be REALLY USEFUL for an organization trying to streamline some of its otherwise heavyweight processes for peer-reviews and related quality metrics:

• CodeCollaborator - Automation for paperless peer code-reviews
  
• CodeReports - Continuous source code metrics over time.
  
• CodePickle - Suspend & resume code changes in local developer sandboxes (implements the PrivateVersions pattern without using version-control branches)
  
• CodeReviewer - automated peer-to-peer code reviews across remote sites
• CodeHistorian - Data-mining and visualizations for version control systems.

And "No!" they did not ask me to blog or say anything nice about them or their products! I'm simply coming from the perspective of someone in a large organization who has witnessed a lot of homegrown and heavyweight processes and tools for these kinds of things, and don't see too many commercial tools addressing the peer-review aspect of development and trying to make it lighter-weight and better-integrated with version-control and the rest of SCM.

The have some other nice resources too:

• Agile Peer Review: Methods, and Results (Powerpoint Presentation)
• The Case for Peer Code Review
• Brand New Information about Code Reviews
• 11 Best Practices for peer code review
• 2500 Reviews at Cisco® - The Largest Case Study of Code Review, Ever
• Why formal inspections fail
• Team-Building for the Cold, Dark, and Alone
• Compare 5 styles of review
• Pros & Cons of Four Types of Review
• Social effects of peer code review

Looks like a lot of "good stuff" to me!!!