Development: Code Review

We define a "Code Reviewer" as somebody who carefully looks over submitted source code, checking it for correctness, thinks about areas for potential optimization, and then reports or provides such feedback to the original authour.

Why have a Code Review?

Nobody is perfect; we are all human and, hence, despite even the most rigorous attempts not to, we can potentially err somewhere along the way. In development, it is often the case that an unrecognized bug makes its way into the code, and then remains latent until it manifests itself in some more obvious way and its presence is finally realized (i.e end user reports an error that is ultimately traced to being derived from the bug in the code that was present all along). The only way to make the linux-dvb code as stable and robust as possible is by having as many developers as possible analyze the source and watch out for potential bugs and weaknesses.

When should you have a code review?

If you encounter a bug please file a Bug Report to the linux-dvb Mailing List or even better, send a Bugfix in unified diff format created with cvs -q diff -pu > patchname.diff to the mailing list.

When you get a nice idea how to make things better or to introduce performance optimisations then please start a thread on the linux-dvb Mailing List and let's discuss it.

As soon you encounter a point where you see that it would make sense to rewrite portions of the code, to get into a deeper refactoring process, please have a look at the "Hints for Refactoring existing DVB drivers" article.