Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 7
Maintain
Organizational
Standards
with Code Audits
Perform Design
Reviews
Continuously
Reduce Code
Complexity
Reduce
Duplicate
Code
Assess Code
Coverage
That man is great who can use the brains
of others to carry out his work.
—D
ONN
P
IATT
Peer-based code reviews are generally considered beneficial to the
overall quality of a code base because they present opportunities for an
objective analysis by a second pair of eyes. For this same reason, XP's
pair programming practice offers some of the same objective analysis
benefits. Static source code analysis tools like Java's PMD and .NET's
FxCop, which scan files for violations of predefined rules, offer some
of the same analysis benefits.
All three of these techniques for code analysis (code reviews, pair
programming, and static code analysis), however, are only marginally
useful unless rigorously applied—their analysis benefits fade over
time without proactive reinforcement. Moreover, code reviews and
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