My code review checklist

I am not a fan of checklists (especially for code reviews). Code review checklists start small and then slowly become really large and unwieldy. After sometime checklist becomes a bottleneck and instead of improving effectiveness of your process, these lengthy checklists start reducing the effectiveness. 

However, there are situations where I used checklists and they worked very well. For example, a Customer Release checklist. There are many small small things that you need to do before sending the new release to customer. Its easy to miss few critical steps. A release checklist has always worked very well.

I was not sure why in typical organization sometimes checklists did not work well (for example, in cases like code review) while sometimes it really worked. What exactly is the difference ?

Sometime back I read Atul Gawande's book 'Checklist Manifesto'. It triggered my interest in Checklists again. As first step I extracted a Code Review checklist from my code review training content. I have used this 'mental' checklist for a many-many years. It has worked well for me even with different programming languages (C/C++, Java, Python, C#, Javascript) and technologies. 

Here is my code review checklist.

Code Review Checklist from Nitin Bhide

PS :  Based on my experiences, information from Atul Gawande's book and from information internet, I have now prepared a 4 hour hands-on session on creating and improving the checklists. Contact me if you are interested.

Simple Code analysis with TC Tool - Analyzing code duplication

There are many code duplication tools available (opensource and commercial) like CPD - Copy Paste Detector or Simian. However CDD (Code Duplication Detector) in TCToolkit has some unique advantages.In a previous blog post I have explained why I wrote CDD

• It uses excellent Pygments library for parsing the source code. Hence all the languages supported by Pygments are supported by CDD for duplication check.
• It is reasonably Fast.  Last few weeks I spent some time optimizing it for speed.
  For example, on my Dell laptop it detected 164 duplicates in 1445 files of Tomcat source code in 45 seconds.
• It can output duplications in multiple formats. 
• In simple text format.
• In HTML format with 'syntax highlighted' duplicate text fragments
• It can also add Cpp/Java style '// code comments' in the original source code.
• It create a matrix visualization of duplication to identify any duplication patterns. See the example below for Tomcat source (org/apache/coyote/http11) directory.
  
  
  

Here is the command line that I used for tomcat code analysis

cdd.py -l java -o javadups.htm

To see all the options available

cdd.py --help

There are few other simple code visualization tools in TCToolkit like TTC (Token Tag Cloud) or CCOM (Class Concurrence Matrix). I will explain their usage in later posts.

Give it a try and tell me your opinion.