Peer Review- Effective Agile Way to Improve Quality

 

Many times, peer review is unwelcomed in agile practises by organisations and teams as it has been carried out for a long time by traditional systems, assuming it is not suitable for agile practices. But the organisations and teams that used peer review in their projects have observed it as a helpful tool and made peer review an important and integral part of agile team work.

How has this peer review helped these teams and organizations, and how have agile processes aligned perfectly with peer review?

Let’s learn the details about using peer review in agile and how to improve its effectiveness with the best tips.

Code review completely supports agile views by promoting the development of working software, interactions between teams, collaboration, concentrating on technical excellence, responding to change, and making real-time improvements just by making some changes in the traditional understanding of peer review.

Instead of meeting in a traditional non-agile manner to review code, consider collective ownership and taking responsibility for the code they created.It is good to follow lightweight code review processes with agile. Reviewing other codes in peer review will provide new tricks and knowledge and also raise awareness of quality as team members' status will be at stake. The lightweight code review methods for agile are as below.

Types of Lightweight Code Review

·       Email Pass Around

·       Over the Shoulder

·       Tool Assist Review

·       Pair Programming

What Does Agile Peer Review Mean?

The software development team adopts various methodologies for delivering the best quality software and developing a better place for software development. Various things are integrated to obtain it, and one of these things is peer review.

It is a process by which the developer will review the code developed by other developers in the team.

The Benefits of Peer Review

Provides the team with better code quality. It improves the quality of the source code, resulting in the easy addition of features and new functionality. The reviewer, while reviewing a less experienced person's code, can help in estimating time accurately when a developer fails due to lack of experience. This will result in the correct resource and time allocation. By providing proper time and resource estimation, peer review will provide the benefit of effective cost management, eliminating the wastage of time and resources both. By keeping all the boxes checked, fixing bugs on time, ensuring quality source code is present within a cycle, etcetera. It will help in improving efficiency and accuracy, hence, developing and enhancing the complete process and bringing success to the project.

Best Practices to Have Better Peer Review in a Team

Make sure you understand what needs to be looked into a code. The code is written for certain requirements, some functionalities, and certain criteria. So, while reviewing the code, make sure to check if those requirements are fulfilled. Understand the code and what is expected from the code before you start reviewing it. Ensure you assign a particular time for code review and that time is not extended unnecessarily just because too many detailed reviews at the beginning are done, leaving less time for further review. Make sure to go with a particular length of approximately 500–5000 lines for a code at a time. To find the defect in the code is possible, but going too many lines at the same time will make it less likely to find defects. Better communication between the code developer and reviewer is necessary as it provides healthy conversation and clear ideas about code use, development, and details, giving more effective results to the team. Providing positive feedback on peer review will show results where a positive environment is fostered within a team, the development cycle is becoming effective, and the team is making the team a better place to work, and the team members a better team to work with. Keep on looking and learning about the updated and new tools that can help the team with code review and automate the process to have better results.

Peer review with proper implementation and right practises in a team can provide the team with many benefits in agile. Many top companies are using peer review processes to achieve the quality of code and also have obtained the desired results from them, showing us that peer review is a proper fit and effective way in agile to improve code quality.

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.

Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. We provide various SAFe certification courses along with DevOps, Scrum, Agile Coaching and more trainings. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.