Recently, I’ve been doing code reviews for a group of junior devs. I’m pleased to have the opportunity, but I find we’re spending more time on fundamentals than the actual stories.

To address this, I’ve put together a checklist of things to check before submitting your code to be reviewed. It’s not meant to be exhaustive, just a short list intended to help us spend less time reviewing the basics and more on the parts the basics are supporting.

Are there other items you’d include on this list?

• Is the code up to date with master?
• Does the code run? Do all the tests pass? (This also means no “expected failures.”)
• Do all the classes and methods have comments?
• Have you removed all of your “debugging” code (e.g. System.out, console.log, or other platform equivalent).
• There should not be any outstanding changes from previous reviews.
• There should not be changes which aren’t part of the specific ticket you’re working on.
• There should be no blocks of commented out code.