Formal Review Process

Formal Review Process

Problem: Code and design inspections are not happening often enough to be effective, or the inspections are not rigorous enough to be effective.

Context/Forces:

• You are doing code and/or design reviews
• You may or may not have FormalStandards
• There is no clear idea of what to inspect and how to review designs and code
• Some developers don't "get away from coding" unless they are forced
• Some things are being reviewed, and some aren't

Solution: Institute a formal review process. Document and enforce how designs and/or code is to be reviewed.

(I have even seen employee performance scores affected by their adherence to a code standard, which was enforced by the review process)

Resulting Context: Code and/or design reviews are being done according to known guidelines for everything produced by a development team.

Related Patterns: See CodeReviewPatterns.

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I've read (and firmly believe) that CodeReviews are near-worthless without good CodingConventions and that it is impossible to maintain CodingConventions without CodeReviews. --JeremyCromwell

A lot of Smalltalk groups maintain CodingConventions without formal code reviews. The code gets read a lot by everyone on the team, but not in a review. So, I don't think the second half of this statement is true.

What is a FormalReviewProcess? This pattern says "have one", but it doesn't say what one is. --RalphJohnson

I think for most people FormalReviewProcess = "It's written down". Sort of like ISO9000. --JasonYip

See FormalReviewTechniques