What Belongs in an Effective Code Review Checklist?

As engineering teams become more established, the need to formalize a code review process becomes more important. At PullRequest, we’ve observed time and time again one of the most frequented formalization practices is to compose a code review checklist that can be applied to every pull request that’s opened by the team.

However, for checklists to be effective, teams need to use them consistently and comprehensively with each code review. That imposition can make checklists controversial, especially within engineering teams that resist process.

So, what separates the good code review checklists from ineffective ones?

By Lyal Avery

4 Benefits of Outsourcing Your Code Review

If you want to write clean, maintainable code, you need code review.

Automated tests and quality assurance (QA) can catch defects and edge cases, but only a second pair of qualified eyes can make sure the design and logic of your code are going to work long-term.

To keep the product development cycle moving faster, and reduce the amount of technical debt they create, more companies are turning to outsourced code review. Outsourced code review is scalable to your needs and your schedule. You can receive an evaluation quickly from developers with expertise in many different technologies.

If you’re considering outsourcing your code review, here are four benefits you should be aware of.

By Lyal Avery

Giving Back Through Code Review

Every June, Google celebrates GoogleServe—a month-long campaign to encourage Googlers to volunteer in their communities. This year, PullRequest worked with the Google.org team to sign up 50 Googlers across 14 offices to provide code review to nonprofit projects, like the Wikimedia Commons Android app and Techtonica’s tech training curriculum for women and non-binary adults.

By Brian Rose

Code Reviewer Spotlight: Eli Perelman

A passion for contributing to open source projects is one of the most common traits we see in PullRequest code reviewers. Eli Perelman has dedicated his programming career to helping other developers through open source. Now, as a PullRequest code reviewer, Eli applies his commitment to improving the experience of other developers to reviewing code for other teams.

This Code Reviewer Spotlight is part of an ongoing series of interviews where we ask our top reviewers the following seven questions so you can get to know them. Below, discover how Eli sees being a reviewer as another a way to improve the experiences of other developers.

By Brennan Angel

The $85 Billion Cost of Bad Code

A recent study from Stripe and Harris Poll found the average developer spends 42% of their time dealing with technical debt and maintenance issues, of which 3.8 hours are spent just on debugging “bad code,” or poor quality code that’s difficult to maintain. The opportunity cost of bad code comes to $85 billion annually — resources that could otherwise be used to build better software.

By Lyal Avery