Code reviews

Often integrated in ITS tools nowadays, code reviews facilitate team cooperation by encouraging the critical analysis of the changes proposed to the code base, it can be useful to detect potential issues before the proposed changes make it to the master branch. Depending on the project requirements, code reviews may be recommended, or even enforced to the team, with the purpose of increasing the quality of the code and early detection of defects by human inspection.

When properly integrated with the VCS, it is possible to set a threshold of mandatory positive reviews from other members in the team before the commit is actually considered for merging. It is possible to mandate the reviews of each single commit in the master branch, using tools such as Gerrit, integrated with the VCS. Depending on the size of the commits, this mechanism can introduce some unnecessary overhead, so, in most cases, it may be more appropriate to review the changes introduced by a branch altogether when the branch is proposed for a merge in master. Mechanisms based on merge requests give the reviewers an overview of the changes introduced during the entire development of the modification proposed.