It is a well-known fact in the software industry that bugs found later in the design cycle are more expensive to correct than those found earlier. In the worst case, the product ships with uncorrected bugs that require a maintenance release and costly in-the-field upgrades, and possibly damaging the reputation of the company.
One of the most cost-effective ways of eliminating bugs very early in the development cycle is to perform source code reviews. In this exercise colleagues study each other’s code with an eye towards finding coding problems. This upfront investment in time and effort can save time and expense later on.
Code reviews can be applied with great flexibility during the development cycle. They can be performed on the complete or partial project, and can be done at various times such as prior to Alpha and Beta releases, prior to system testing or at other milestones. Code reviews can target different types of problems such as compliance with the design, coding style compliance, maintainability, portability, logic errors, etc.
To this end, Atollic’s TrueSTUDIO embedded C/C++ IDE integrates features for source code reviews and code review meetings as standard. The company believes that since code review requires intensive study of the code, and since the best code management tool is the IDE, it makes sense to put code review tools directly into the IDE, not only for convenience and ease of use, but to facilitate this important practice by lowering barriers to the practice.
Once colleagues have reviewed each other’s source code individually, the reviewers then get together in a code review meeting where all review comments are discussed, and action items are decided on for each review comment. These include classification of issues such as ‘valid and must be fixed’, ‘invalid’ or ‘valid but fix later.’
The loop is closed by the review comments being corrected according to the decisions made in the code review meeting. Each developer or reviewer gets a work-list with code review comments he was appointed to correct. Using this methodology, code reviews can be run easily with the benefit of both improved software quality and skills spread between developers in the team.
Once developers have a chance to implement their modifications, they mark their progress using the code review tools within TrueSTUDIO. Team leaders then have information at their disposal about what issues were addressed, and by whom.
Atollic also offers a consulting service to perform source code reviews of its customers’ projects. This can target a full project or parts of it, with different focus (design, coding style, decision logic, portability, etc.) according to requirements.
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