Why Automating Code Review Is Vital for Your Organization
Why Automating Code Review Is Vital for Your Organization?
Automated code review tools make code review easier for developers that want to maintain consistency during the development process. If you want to standardize coding practices and ensure you do not run into bugs and exploits at the end of your app development phase, having automated code review tools at your disposal can be very usual.
Automated code reviews are not meant to be replacements to peer reviews or external reviews, but they are very useful at eliminating human error. It is easy for a developer to overlook errors in his own code. And with multiple developers working on the same app, pinpointing faults in code can be very difficult. Large enterprises like Adobe and PayPal have adopted automated code reviews to speed up development, and automated review tools should be a part of your development process too.
Common Arguments Against Automating Code Review
Here are some of the most common arguments against automated code reviews. While automation might not be the best solution, it definitely complements the development process and contributes greatly to the development process of any software.
Automated Code Reviews Lead to More Development Time: Manual code reviews involve reading every line of code at every development phase. While it is easy to understand the intent of developers and spot mistakes if there are any, manual auditing is much slower than automated tools. Automation software can read thousands of lines of code in seconds. It cannot identify the business logic in code or the intentions of the developer, which can lead to false positives, which is why pairing both auditing methods is the best way forward. But using automated code reviews does not lead to more development time by any means.
Automated Code Reviews Are Not Accurate: Manual code reviews are more likely to understand hidden paths in code. Techniques like penetration testing cannot be done using automated coding, according to developers who distrust automated code reviews. But the truth is, automated code reviewers can actually explore hidden paths. There are sophisticated tools out the bere that can understand the intent behind each commit you make to your code.
Automated Code Reviews Are Expensive: Getting a highly-skilled group of coders to evaluate your code is proven to be much more expensive. Moreover, inexperienced developers may not be able to evaluate code properly. When using automated code reviewers, you do not need the skills or knowledge of reviewing code. The automation software automatically alerts you of any potential errors and helps you make changes to your code during the development phase.
Automated code reviews as a whole are more effective as they can identify vulnerabilities that may be overlooked during manual reviews. Isolated problems can also be hard to catch when reviewing code manually.
How Is Code Review Automated?
Automated tools are very efficient at reviewing and assessing code. Software-based tools are usually browser-based and can integrate with most IDEs and SCM development frameworks used in the industry. You can track all comments made by team members. Automated tools overcome many limitations that are faced with traditional code review practices. They also generate usage statistics and offer metrics needed to optimize your application. The tools have collaborative options to help developers be in the loop of all changes made to your app at every stage.
Best Practices
During the review process, you should first opt for an automated review. Any errors that are identified should be annotated before another manual review process. External metrics should be focused on first. Any metrics-driven code review is going to be more effective. Once an automated code review is complete, authors should annotate the code to help manual reviewers go through the changes. All changes made to code must be annotated to keep track of all changes that are being done to your application’s code. With multiple teams working on a single app, it can be difficult to keep track of bug fixes and changes done to your app.
If you run into a large number of errors, you should create a checklist. Checking for omissions is the most difficult part about fixing code. Neither human peer reviewers or automated code reviewers can identify mistakes in code that does not exist. With constant changes being made because of the review and commit process, ensure that developers cross-check development goals and implement all elements of your app.
Conclusion
There also needs to be a clear process of fixing errors whenever mistakes are found in code. The optimization process after a review should involve the use of a collaborative code review tool. If all developers are not aware of changes being made to an app, it only leads to more difficulties in development. At the end of the development phase, the project should be sent to a QA team for a final assessment. Automated code review tools are essential if you want to streamline your development process and meet development and release deadlines.
Sign Up with GitHub, Bitbucket or Gitlab to get a free trial of our automated code review tool, Codegrip, and begin your journey to a higher quality of code
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