In SFIM, a high-quality code review should be:
- Constructive: remember the human you are reviewing and treat them with professionalism and respect. It is an opportunity for the reviewee to learn more, and for the reviewer to learn to communicate their ideas clearly.
- Clear and Actionable: whomever you're reviewing should be able to act independently with your review in hand. Reviews should make it clear what an approvable implementation would consist of if the reviewer requests changes. Reviews should only contain actionable items, and avoid values judgements such as "this is bad."
- Enforcing Consistency: Reviews should ensure that lab code has a consistent style and logic, which enhances future legibility and reproducibility across different projects and even by other labs.
- Skill Level Appropriate: There is a range of skillsets in the lab. Please make sure that your review is actionable (See point 2) for someone of the skillset you're reviewing. You cannot expect a novice programmer to write highly complex implementations without large amounts of guidance or perfect style. If the code requires a large amount of review or interference, consider co-programming over video call.
You may use the following as resources for code review:
- MIT Reading on Code Review (Note: uses Java language but has good tips).