: Re: Methods for writing a code review I currently spend a good deal of time over at Code Review and I would love to improve the quality of the reviews I write. Can you give me any insight into

@Gonzalez219

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The type of code review written in a professional programming project is a completely different animal from what is on CR SE.

The reviews on CR SE at least try to follow the general SE guideline of "be nice". They also often suggest alternative ways to fix the problem, and argue that one fix might be "better" than another.

Professional code reviews don't waste words on "being nice", and their purpose is not to fix errors, but only to find them. In a programming team, everybody knows that everybody (including themselves) makes mistakes. The purpose of code review is to find them, not to avoid bruising delicate egos.

Much of the content of CR SE reviews would (or should) never get as far as a professional code review. Issues like inappropriate use of "namespace" etc should be pickup up by software, not by humans - and in any case, you wouldn't expect a professional programmer to break the basic coding standards that apply to the project he/she is working on. Much of the code being reviewed on CR SE isn't written to follow any particular standards, except the nebulous concept of "good practice".

A professional review might well say something as terse as "Line 75: off by one error" or "Line 80: fails when foo() returns a null value." If the best way to fix the problems is to completely refactor 10 or 20 functions in the code, it's not the job of the reviewer to decide that is the best solution, or to do the work. But that style of writing won't get you many up-votes on CR SE!

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