Author: Chetan Giridhar
Published at: testingexperience, September 2010 Edition
image courtesy: http://testingexperience.com
According to Wikipedia, “Code review is systematic examination(often as peer review) of computer source code intended to find andfix mistakes overlooked in the initial development phase, improving both the overall quality of software and the developers‘ skills.”
Code Review has been a good practice featuring as an important part of the software development life cycle. Not only has the practice helped in finding or rather preventing critical defects early in the cycle (thereby reducing the bug fixing costs), but it has also been instrumental in improving developers’ knowledge and build exposure to the other components of the software.
However, have we ever seen QA professionals participating actively in code reviews? With Quality Assurance being a proactive process aimed at preventing defects, wouldn’t code review feature in the QA realm as well? Would it make sense to make code reviews an integral part of QA processes? Are there any risks associated with doing so?
This article aims at breaking the myth, or at least triggering a thought process, of why testers couldn’t be or shouldn’t be an imperative part of code reviews. During the course of this article, the author substantiates the merits of the thought and also throws light on the flip side of it. At the end, the author hopes that the readers (independent of their role in the software industry) give this philosophy sufficient thought and evaluate whether including testers in code reviews would be beneficial as a process and if it would be helpful for their team context or not.
Click to download the article – Advocating Code Review For Testers
