what to look for

We've previously covered at What to Look for in Java 8 Code, now Java is moving faster than ever it's time to do an update and cover what to look for in Java 9 code. While Java 9 has even now been replaced with Java 10, and Java 11 in coming in September, these Java 9 features are, of course, available in Java 10 and 11. If your application is using any version later than Java 8 you may benefit fr

In earlier blog posts we've talked about general things to look for during a code review. Recently I've been working a lot with Java 8, and I'm starting to have some opinions on what modern Java code should look like.  I've written about some of my Top Tips from an IntelliJ IDEA point of view, but I'd like to share these and more in the form of feedback you could give during a review of Java 8 cod

We’ve had two themes running through the articles on what to look for in a code review: Lots of what we’re tempted to look for can (and should) be automated Humans are good at checking things computers can not. In this final post in the series, we’re going to look at the grey area in between - we’re going to look at how the features in Upsource can make your job as a human code reviewer e

This is part 6 of 6 posts on what to look for in a code review. See previous posts from the series. How much work you do building a secure, robust system is like anything else on your project - it depends upon the project itself, where it’s running, who’s using it, what data it has access to, etc. Often, if our team doesn't have access to security experts, we go too far in one direction or the

This is part 5 of 6 posts on what to look for in a code review. See other posts from the series. In today's post we'll look more closely at the design of the code itself, specifically checking to see if it follows good practice Object Oriented Design.  As with all the other areas we've covered, not all teams will prioritise this as the highest value area to check, but if you are trying to follo

This is part 4 of 6 posts on what to look for in a code review. See previous posts from the series. Data structures are a fundamental part of programming - so much so it's actually one of the areas that's consistently taught in Computer Science courses. And yet it's surprisingly easy to misuse them or select the wrong one. In this post, we're going to guide you, the code reviewer, on what to lo

This is part 3 of 6 posts on what to look for in a code review. See other posts from the series. In part three of our series on code reviews, we’re going to cover what you can look for in terms of the performance of the code under review. As with all architecture/design areas, the non-functional requirements for the performance of a system should have been set up-front. Whether you're workin

This is part 2 of 6 posts on what to look for in a code review. See other posts from the series. In the last post we talked about a wide variety of things you could look for in a code review. Now we’ll focus on one area: what to look for in the test code. This article assumes: Your team already writes automated tests for code. The tests are regularly run in a Continuous Integration (CI

This is part 1 of 6 posts on what to look for in a code review. See other posts from the series. Let’s talk about code reviews. If you take only a few seconds to search for information about code reviews, you’ll see a lot of articles about why code reviews are a Good Thing (for example, this post by Jeff Atwood). You also see a lot of documentation on how to use Code Review tools like our very own