Code Reviews: Pros/Cons

Overview

This past week we were given our first crack at a review for our classmates DueDates Software system. Some were good, some were bad... The thing is, we were previously given a bootstrap of the software, so about 80% of the programming was done for us! The programming portion of the assignment was really simple, just simple arg handling in the main(). I feel that the real exercise of the assignment was to make use of all of the techniques and tool that learned the first half of the semester and execute something useful. The review process is nice and quick, thanks to Google Code Project hosting. The tasks/issues, commit logs, and source change logs make this a peice of cake.

Pros

Reading other people's code opens a whole new insight on things: coding styles, logic, and feedback on our own code. I find reading code that makes sense to be a treat, a lot harder to find these days. The feedback we get on your code is great, another form of constructive crisitism! Funny how this is the first time someone has ever told me to use the Scanner class vs Buffered Reader (Something I learned back in 04'). I feel that we need more peer code review in software development; I find it to be a big help when it comes to improving the quality of my code.

Cons

Its really a disappointment when you are reviewing code that is supposed to be "completed" and there are just signs of "last minute effort" all over the code. There was a group that didn't even check if the table being retrieved was the table of interest. Also comments like "Author: Philip Johnson" and "Assume the first table is the one we need. Not true in general." were ignored. The amount of time spent on the project is really reflected on the amount of time that was put into it.