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Interactive Code Review Checklist

Doing a code review? This interactive checklist can help you. It works offline and saves automatically, so you can continue your review later.

Functional Review

The change works as you expect The change matches the specification

UI, UX & Accessibility

UI changes are consistent with other parts of the application User-visible texts are easy to read UI changes are accessible

Implementation

There is no obvious simpler solution No missed opportunities to use design patterns Uses best practices for modularization, abstraction and structure Code uses speaking variable, function and class names

Comments & Documentation

New comments have been added in the code (only) where necessary Comments should explain why something is done, not how Existing code comments are still valid Comments tend to get outdated really quickly, so it's good to double-check existing comments in changed code. The user documentation has been updated The user-facing documentation should include all important features and up-to-date screenshots.

Security & Privacy Concerns

Authentication and authorization are checked Passwords and sensitive data are not stored in plaintext Sensitive data are not written to logs etc. All user input is sanitized Data are stored in accordance with applicable laws (GDPR etc.)

Dependencies

No superfluous dependency to library/framework No missed opportunity to integrate library/framework

Tests

The code was written to be testable Best practice is to write code that can be easily (unit-)tested. Enough tests have been written (or adapted) for the code changes Testing can be done in different stages (unit, integration, end-to-end tests) The test suite passes

Tools & Linting

No new warnings from linter tools are present Tools like Teamscale analyze code changes and point out potential problems. No new findings should be reported for the code changes. Existing linter warnings in touched code have been fixed To gradually improve over time, changed code should be cleaned up whenever possible ("boy scout rule")

References & Resources

An overview of things to consider when doing code reviews by Michaela Greiler. There is also a podcast episode with her.
What Types of Defects Are Really Discovered in Code Reviews? There is an IEEE paper examining this question.
Can there ever be an exhaustive review checklist? This blog post says: Nope.

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