Hello all. I work on a small team and I’ve been tasked with taking on the bulk of code review for when my senior goes on leave. Although I’ve read a fair bit of code (man am I lucky I learned to code before AI “got good”) I can’t say I’ve done a lot of actual “review”. Does anyone have any tips? I feel responsible if anything breaks after I review it so of course I want to avoid that.
I’ve done thousands of reviews, been a senior for the last 4 years, and a tech lead for three of those. If I could distill what I’ve learned into a few tips:
Make sure you understand what you know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
If something feels weird, explore it, your gut is a leading indicator of bad code.
Think about how you would know if there was something wrong with the code after its deployed.
Think about how hard it would be to change the code later on.
Those are probably my big ones for general code reviews, there’s more specific ones for v&v and embedded, but I feel like these apply to everything.