Getting to Better Code Reviews

I recently set out to improve the process I use for reviewing code that myself and others have written. I wanted to focus on being more systematic and getting consistent results for the time investment.

The reviews I was doing appeared to be going well enough: they were picking up problems and I was making sensible suggestions for how to improve code quality; less bugs seemed to be finding their way into the final product when I did the reviews than when I didn’t and I felt more confident about code that had been through review. But I began to suspect that the quality of these reviews were variable and subject to random and unpredictable human factors.