Update content on code critique/review

[bernhold]

Perhaps we should revise/extend the existing CC article https://bssw.io/items/what-constitutes-constructive-code-critique to also include things like Jeff Carver's Peer Code Review tutorial and other similar resources.

(Or maybe they should be separate items?)

[rinkug]

David to re-look at this.

[rinkug]

Attention @bernhold to re-look at this

[markcmiller86]

I up-voted. I like idea of just adding links to existing article and re-publishing.

[pagrubel]

Would you change the title? I think the topic should be added and not sure I care if it's separate or not.

[rinkug]

Team decided that this needs to be a different curated content article.

[bartlettroscoe]

We need to add a "Peer Review" subcategory under "Better Reliability" beside "Testing", "Reproducability", etc.

[bernhold]

@bartlettroscoe you created #777 for this. I've asked SBX and PC what it takes on their side to add a new topic so that we can figure out what the threshold needs to be for such requests. (We also have #591 proposing "sustainability" as a topic area.)

[rinkug]

Do we have enough articles/critical mass to justify a new topic? I would think we would atleast 6-7 articles? Is the team on board with this? @bartlettroscoe : do you know (without much additonal effort) what articles in BSSw.io can be re-organized under this category?

@bartlettroscoe you created #777 for this. I've asked SBX and PC what it takes on their side to add a new topic so that we can figure out what the threshold needs to be for such requests. (We also have #591 proposing "sustainability" as a topic area.)

Good to know the effort it takes, at the very least..

Rinku

[bartlettroscoe]

Related to:

• 1025

We should update/replace article to give several references on code review best practices backed up by research and provide a summary. Here are some pages that have common points of agreement based on recent research:

• http://viewer.media.bitpipe.com/1253203751_753/1284482743_310/11_Best_Practices_for_Peer_Code_Review.pdf
• https://smartbear.com/learn/code-review/best-practices-for-peer-code-review/
• https://smartbear.com/resources/ebooks/the-state-of-code-review-2020-report/
• https://static1.smartbear.co/smartbear/media/pdfs/best-kept-secrets-of-peer-code-review_redirected.pdf
• https://www.atlassian.com/blog/add-ons/code-review-best-practices
• https://www.perforce.com/blog/qac/9-best-practices-for-code-review
• https://www.michaelagreiler.com/code-review-best-practices/
• https://jserd.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40411-018-0058-0
• https://snyk.io/learn/code-review/

Some of the key suggestions they all agree on (which are backed up with research) include:

• Create a code review checklist (and review goals)
• Don't review code for longer than 60 minutes at at time
• Check no more than 400 lines at a time
• Automate to save time

and there are others.

I am willing to update this article and change to title to

"Peer Code Review Best Practices"

And this should be a short article using wikize-refs.py, not a CC article.

After a extremely poor experience with PR reviews recently, I am motivated to write this up so that I can point people to this (and apply more of this myself such as creating PR review checklists).

[bartlettroscoe]

@rinkug, you moved this to "In Progress" on 9/2/2021 as shown above. Is this really "In Progress"? Who is the author and EB member?

[bartlettroscoe]

Here is another article to add to this:

• https://www.perforce.com/blog/vcs/how-to-do-code-reviews

[bartlettroscoe]

@betterscientificsoftware/bssw-editorial-board,

If there is a need another article for bssw.io this month, I could trying writing a short original article on the subject of peer code review best practices condensing and summarizing the info from the sources listed above.

Let me know if you are interested in an article like that.

[bartlettroscoe]

Related to this topic, I am reading and interesting article about bias in code reviews:

• https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2022/3/258909-the-pushback-effects-of-race-ethnicity-gender-and-age-in-code-review/fulltext

with the high-level summary:

• https://www.zdnet.com/education/computers-tech/how-to-use-tab-groups-in-google-chrome/

This article also contains a more detailed document:

• https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3474097

I will create a new issue for my review of this article.

I am still interested in writing an original article pulling together all of this material about peer code review for bssw.io.

[bernhold]

1025 mentions https://rethought.se/research/modern-code-reviews/ as a further addition to such a resource.

Some folks were having VPN-related problems accessing the site, but it works for me today.

[bernhold]

I don't think this is really in progress. Moving back to ready to write.

[bartlettroscoe]

I would like to write a short original article on this topic as per above.

[bartlettroscoe]

I would really like something short and focused that I could point people to.

[bartlettroscoe]

1025 mentions https://rethought.se/research/modern-code-reviews/ as a further addition to such a resource.

That looks like a great summary of the relevant research articles on what has been learned about peer code review since 2005.

NOTE: This would also be a guide for best practices for setting up and structuring GitHub pull requests (PRs) (or GitLab Merge Requests). This would reference and describe how it relates to other articles on bssw.io like:

• https://bssw.io/items/coding-conventions
• https://bssw.io/items/pull-request-size-matters

[bartlettroscoe]

Okay, I am picking this up to write.