Conducting constructive code reviews

[namurphy]

Possible community call topic: Conducting constructive code reviews

Code review is an essential component of software engineering. Code reviews at their best improve code quality, facilitate sharing of knowledge, and build team cohesion. Code reviews at their worst are demoralizing and stressful, and may even cause people to stop contributing to a project. In this community call, we will share our experiences with conducting and receiving code reviews, and discuss strategies on how to ensure that code reviews are healthy and constructive.

[JeffCarver]

I'm in favor of this one. I've done a few tutorials on the topic and think it could make for an interesting discussion. Would be great to hear experiences from the group and collectively learn.

[cosden]

I'd also be interested in how those without a project/peer group have done code reviews. With so many "lone wolf" RSEs is there a solution? Could quid pro quo style reviews with others outside the project/organization work?

[NickleDave]

Hi all, just want to continue this discussion

I'd also be interested in how those without a project/peer group have done code reviews. With so many "lone wolf" RSEs is there a solution? Could quid pro quo style reviews with others outside the project/organization work?

@cosden we actually discussed something like this at the last DEI-WG meeting (cc @lparsons)
I think @exoticDFT is also interested in a solution that would work for "lone wolf" RSES ("single developer"?)

and we've discussed something similar in the code review community calls that I'm part of.
#3 (comment)

At one of those meetings @BatoolMM proposed some sort of decentralized virtual group where single developer RSEs could get review / mentoring in a way they might not be able to locally for various reasons

Also from that comment (quoting myself):

Maybe I could take some notes and bring back to https://github.com/ResearchCodeReviewCommunity
Recently talked with someone about when/where pair programming can achieve many of the same goals as code review

We could maybe invite that person? I know it's a lot to fit into a US-RSE community call but they could possibly give a repeat performance of their five-ten minute talk on why they started a "code clubs" (to achieve a lot of the goals people might want from code review)
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008119
I'd be happy to reach out to them

[JeffCarver]

@NickleDave I would be happy to help organize this community call if we decide to do it in November.

[NickleDave]

Excellent, thank you @JeffCarver -- I was actually going to tag you in Slack.
You're the expert, if anything I should be the one helping you organize!

I don't actually know how the agenda for community calls is typically set, but if we do go ahead with this topic please just let me know what I need to do.

[Aariq]

This is a great idea for a topic. There's a few places one might get practice with peer code review that might be worth mentioning:

• rOpenSci has a review process for statistical software and you can sign up as a reviewer: https://ropensci.org/software-review/
• ReproHack is an organization that holds reproducibility hacks—kind of like peer-code-review, but with a focus on improving reproducibility (https://www.reprohack.org/)
• The Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE) has a peer-code-review "club" (https://github.com/SORTEE/peer-code-review-resources)