Structured Unit Testable Templated Code for Efficient Code Review Process

TL;DR

This paper introduces a structured, unit testable templated code approach to improve code review efficiency, reduce revisions, and minimize side effects, demonstrated through evaluation on large enterprise applications.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel templated code method that enforces standards and enhances productivity, outperforming traditional review processes in large-scale projects.

Findings

Reduced code review time and revision count

Decreased production issues related to code changes

Improved team productivity and code quality

Abstract

Modern software development teams are distributed across onsite and off-shore locations. Each team has developers with varying experience levels and English communication skills. In such a diverse development environment it is important to maintain the software quality, coding standards, timely delivery of features and bug fixes. It is also important to reduce testing effort, minimize side effects such as change in functionality, user experience or application performance. Code reviews are intended to control code quality. Unfortunately, many projects lack enforcement of processes and standards because of approaching deadlines, live production issues and lack of resource availability. This study examines a novel structured, unit testable templated code method to enforce code review standards with an intent to reduce coding effort, minimize revisions and eliminate functional and performance side effects on the system. The proposed method would also result in unit-testable code that can also be easily rolled back and increase team productivity. The baseline for traditional code review processes using metrics such as code review duration, bug regression rate, revision count was measured. These metrics were then compared with results from the proposed code review process that used structured unit testable templated code. The performance on 2 large enterprise level applications spanning over 2 years and 9 feature and maintenance release cycles was evaluated. The structured unit testable templated code method resulted in a decrease in total code review time, revision count and coding effort. It also decreased the number of live production issues caused by code churn or side effects of bug fix when compared to traditional code review process.