In this next installment of my series on code review (the first article was about why we do code review in the first place), we’ll be looking at how to review code effectively. There are several practices that I think make code review effective. In this article I want to focus on one particular one that – if you’re not doing it already – will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your code review.

Code review – at least the type of code review I’m talking about in this blog series – is the process of asynchronously examining and commenting on someone else’s code before it is merged into the main branch of your source control repo. It is a common practice in software development, but why do we do it? Should we do it? What are the benefits of code review? Review Code for Software Quality One of the main reasons to do code review is to improve the quality of the software we produce.