If code revising isn’t the new word for you and most of your code review processes are automated – you rock!
But what if your business is not ready to be transformed and digitized, and you don’t know what to start with? No worries, in this blog post, we will explain how to streamline your development processes with the help of digital revising. You’ll learn what transformation steps to take first, what mistakes to avoid, and what tools to use to achieve great results.
What is Digital Transformation Revising
Successful digital transformation: revising involves the process of peer code review by analyzing the structure of the code without changing its functionality or extending it with additional integrations. In simple words, revising is the process of code improvement and polishment by your teammates. When the code is clean, it’s easier to maintain the project and reduce the number of bugs. Let’s see what is digital transformation revising and how revising can streamline your development process and help you eliminate a lot of bugs.
First of all, let’s find out when your project may need revising and application transformation.
Some of the steps to digital transformation include:
- It becomes too complicated to manipulate the codes, methods, or classes
- Object-oriented programming principles are applied incorrectly or are incomplete
- Superfluous coupling
- To make the project function consistently, there is a need to make repeated code changes in multiple areas
- Unnecessary and clunky code, the removal of which won’t make a difference
Why is revising all about transformations? The answer is simple. With clean code, it’s easier to make future product iterations and innovations to scale the software product. And scaling equals transformations.
Application revising is an iterative process that should be done regularly to ensure the flawless operation of your software product.
Digital Transformation Benefits: Why You Need Code Revising
Code review not only improves your product and helps avoid more serious mistakes but also streamlines the growth of the development team; it helps them improve their skills, techniques, and broad understanding of all aspects of development. When it comes to companies, it helps them foster collaboration, improve efficiency, and reduce costly errors. Here are the main benefits of code revising for your team.
Reduced Bugs
This is the most crucial benefit of code review and the most obvious one. You save an enormous amount of time by doing regular code reviews, and implementing regular code review will save the company crucial resources and ensure a smooth final product.
Project Quality
Every coding project will have a well-defined scope for digital transformation steps and required features, but some developers can misinterpret requirements and features. We’re all humans, and we tend to make mistakes.
Code review helps developers better organize their time and pay attention to requirements while focusing on productivity and ensuring project success with the greatest efficiency. Also, peer reviews check out the code to make sure it aligns with all external regulations.
Better Estimates
When developers look throughout the code and share their coding knowledge and skills, the rest of the team gains deep insights into the original code online transformation. In such a way, the whole team can make better estimates about product optimization, development timeline, and required updates. Everyone will stay on the same page and better understand many issues and areas of concern in the codebase when planning for scaling the product with additional features and integrations.
Collaboration
With code review, everyone is engaged in the process and can make an input. This not only fosters collaboration, but allows more flexibility in terms of time. When there is not only one developer responsible for the code, a specialist can take time off, and the project can move ahead with another team member. This reduces delays, streamlines development, and builds a sense of teamwork.
Built-in Mentorship
Code review provides built-in mentorship for new developers. What is meant by digital transformation? From impartial feedback to important techniques for code optimization, a new developer received regular mentorship from the beginning.
Likewise, as new techniques emerge, younger developers can train their superiors with the latest techniques and information. This two-way mentorship builds an environment for growth.
Digital Transformation Companies Examples
Companies that implement code revising strategy, usually have the following goals in mind:
- Remove defects — The process of code sharing allows developers to catch defects early in the coding process or more easily fix bugs later in the implementation.
- Compliance — Code review helps developers to ensure that software is in compliance with enterprise coding standards.
- Consistency — Code review allows developers to collaborate so that there is consistent coding across all company software.
- Collaboration — The code review process fosters a team environment and mutual trust within the company.
- Optimization — Code review allows developers to hone in and optimize software performance. This is especially important for young developers who are unaware of code optimization techniques to write clean code.
Code review usually consists of the following steps:
Let’s take Microsoft as an example. According to this study, 36% of the developers said they perform code reviews multiple times a day. Another 39% of the developers said they do code reviews at least once per day. 12% do code reviews multiple times a week, and only 13% said they did not do a code review in the past week.
After the review cycle, reviewers mark the code as okay, and senior software developers can finally enroll the code into the common code base.
Some teams have policies that allow developers to enroll the code before an actual review is completed. This is normally restricted to small and trivial changes, in order to allow asynchronous reviews and to speed-up development.
All these steps belong to the typical code review life cycle at Microsoft and are performed by all teams. Depending on the team’s policies, terms are more or less strict for each step.
Digital Revising Examples
To better understand how to make the code revising process efficient, here are the examples of good digital revising processes for guiding the digital transformation of organizations:
- Spreading knowledge
Code review creates excellent conditions for the exchange of knowledge about the programming language and certain technical dependencies that cannot be written directly into the code but result from experience. Let’s look at the following code overview example.
- Excluding potential errors
One of the biggest advantages of code review is catching potential errors at a very early stage of product development. It is much less expensive than when the error is only found on the production server.
“Any stupid can write the program that computer understands but only good programmers write code that humans understand,”— Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist at Thoughtworks.
The general process should look like this:
- Checker: reports a problem with the name of the attempt method, suggesting to use getter or getAttempt ()
- Author: disagrees with this suggestion, stating that getter is used when a process actually fetches data from another source rather than directly returning data from an object
- Checker: agrees with the author of the code but points out that it is better to name such methods so that they indicate the actual functionality. This way, eventually, the method name is changed to the number of attempts in the digital transformation process
Best Digital Revising Tools
Here’s a quick overview of some of the key differences to consider when looking for a tool that suits your needs.
Bundled vs. standalone tool
Some code review tools are bundled into more comprehensive services or suites – such as GitHub, Azure DevOps, or JetBrains Space – while others are standalone resources. It’s important to take into account how integrated a solution can be with the resources you already have in place.
VCS support
Even though Git is one of the predominant version control systems out there (93% of developers surveyed use Git), code review tools can be differentiated by the VCSs they support:
- Git (the vast majority support Git)
- Mercurial (Review Board, Crucible)
- Apache Subversion (RhodeCode, Collaborator)
Workflows
Code review tools support distinct development workflows, which may influence your ultimate choice:
- Pull/Merge requests (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, Space)
- Commits (Space)
- Patches/Diffs (Gerrit, Phabricator)
Automation features
Some code review tools can automate parts of the review process by providing static analysis or integration with CI/CD tools. Automating aspects of the process reduces the heavy lifting demanded of reviewers, allowing them to focus on providing helpful feedback without getting bogged down in minutiae. Here are some features that can simplify your code review process:
- Code navigation (GitLab Code Intelligence)
- Integration with CI/CD tools (Space)
- Security checks
- Detecting and fixing code issues (SonarQube, BitBucket)
“Refactoring takes the software design to the next level and makes it easier to understand, helps to find bugs, and execute the programs faster. Moreover, it changes the way a developer thinks about the code and its improvement,”
— George Serebrennikov, COO at Proxet (ex - Rails Reactor) – a custom software development services company.
Code revising is not all about quick changes, and advantages for business are not always obvious. However, in the long run, you will get better code and a more optimized workflow, which is a large investment in your company’s success.
Want a consultation of the best revising practices and transformation strategy? Proxet provides digital transformation services to companies that want to take their business strategy to the next level. Our team provides consultations to organizations and institutions on how to integrate digital technologies. Contact the Proxet team to help!
