Peer reviewing is the practice of looking at code written by others to find errors or ways to improve the code. Sometimes also called desktop reviewing, this approach can be useful for various reasons:
- If you have a coworker who is more experienced than you, you can learn from him/her
- It’s often helpful to have another set of eyes take a look at code – different people see things differently
- It helps the other programmers keep track of progress in parts of code they are not working on
We’ve been using this practice at work, and I think it has been useful for us in all the above reasons.
Brandon Savage has been writing a post series on peer review. In each post, he takes the original snippet of code a bit more towards better practices, introducing new approaches. Head over to Brandon’s blog to learn more!