Why code review is so important?

Code review is a better practice to share knowledge between colleagues, leveling up skills and know the limitations of each other, including you.

Why?

When you’re practice code review about a code from a co-worker or to an open source project, you’re probably on, at least, three positions:

  • Already know most of the code and can collaborate to a better arrangement or the impacts of the new code;
  • You don’t know anything about the project, but know the syntax and can contribute to a better code style (yeah, I know the lint tools can do this automatically);
  • Or you’re an apprentice learning new things and others can guide through the code.

But as we’re learning something new everyday, we can change the above positions depends on the area the code review will be. For example, I’m a full stack software developer and can contribute for each layer of an application. However, a more specialist colleague can deliver more useful stuff about, let’s say, frontend code.

An example, another day a frontend co-worker requested me to do a code review on a pull request with a code piece that looks something to:

1this.setState({
2- id,
3+ id: +id,
4})

Since, I don’t recognize the reason he made this change, I questioned him and he said this change is to convert a variable id which is a string into an integer.

I’ve always learn something through code reviews, because it’s force you to understand the reasons behind changes proposed and sometimes I don’t know or can’t thought about it.

Another example occurred with me about 7 years ago, when I’ve got my second remote position as software developer working with Ruby on Rails. I’ve motivated because I got this position and I wanted to deliver the first pull request ever, have made the proposed fix on the code with a good test coverage, submit the pull request and I’ve received the first reject from my team leader, questioning about the tests I’ve applied. The unit tests, I’ve write with some metaprogramminng (common use on Ruby) and the rejection is: “The tests should be the more explicitly as you can and avoid such things, because adds complexity and increase readability”.

After that, I know I need to be better at code reviewing others and want to do the same with me.