Code Review Interview Questions

• 1. What is the aim when you do code review?
  1. Add value to System
     • Maintainability
     • Operations
     • Scalability
     • Performance
  2. Add value to People
     • Help them learn new things
  3. Add to Best Practices
     • Identify common mistakes/patterns
• 2. When do you do code review?
  • I do a highly focused code review when:
    • New developer joins the team?
    • New methodology or technology change is being implemented?
    • Vertical Slice is being built
  • Normal Focus
    • Peer Reviews during the sprint
  • Most important thing about code reviews is that they should be done as early and as often as possible
• 3. What are the good practices in doing Code Reviews?
  1. Ideally Pair Programming Reviews
     • Fixing comments directly discussing with developers
  2. Steps
     • 1. Use static analysis tools - SONAR
       • components & their sizes & interactions with other components
       • Hotspots
         • Large Classes
         • Complex methods
         • Large Components
         • Lot of dependencies
         • Uncovered Code
       • Static Analysis Tools are a very good start - but I would not just depend on static analysis tools for code review
     • 2. Review Junits for complex methods/classes
       • I think quality of Junit is a great guide to the quality of system
       • Makes all the dependencies very clear
     • 3. Check Readability of code
       • Most important of the 4 principles of Simple Design
     • 4. Check everything mentioned in the fourth category : what?
• 4. What are the things you look for in the Code Review?
  1. Architecture
     • Frameworks choice
     • Communication with other sytems
     • Testability
     • Components
       • Relative size
     • Reuse
       • Existing components
       • Creating new components
  2. Design
     • Interactions between classes
       • Coupling
       • Cohesion
     • Layer Responsibilities
       • Web Layer
         • Business logic creeping in?
       • Assemblers
       • Business Layer
       • Access Layer
     • OOPS principles
       • Domain Models
     • Unit Tests
       • How easy is it to unit test?
  3. Cross Cutting
     • Reuse
     • NFRs
       • Scalability
       • Performance
       • Security
       • Needs of operations team
         • Logging etc
  4. Code
     • 4 principles of simple design
     • Basics
       • Formatting
       • Size
       • Complexity
       • New language features
       • Documentation
         • Javadoc
     • Scalability
       • Bottlenecks
     • Performance
       • NO premature optimizations
       • Object creation in loops
       • Closing connections and other open stuff
       • Session usage
       • Caching?
       • Database related?
     • Operations
       • Proper Exception Handling
       • Transaction Management
     • Security
     • Unit tests
       • Readable
     • Langauge Specific
       • Object class methods
         • equals
         • hashcode
       • String
       • Generics
       • Enums
       • Creating and destroying objects
  5. I also try get a hang of the Engineering Practices followed.
     • How often is code committed?
     • Release practices
     • Broken Builds
     • Deployment Practices
     • Continuous Integration