  Modern software development teams are distributed across onsite and off-shore
locations. Each team has developers with varying experience levels and English
communication skills. In such a diverse development environment it is important
to maintain the software quality, coding standards, timely delivery of features
and bug fixes. It is also important to reduce testing effort, minimize side
effects such as change in functionality, user experience or application
performance. Code reviews are intended to control code quality. Unfortunately,
many projects lack enforcement of processes and standards because of
approaching deadlines, live production issues and lack of resource
availability. This study examines a novel structured, unit testable templated
code method to enforce code review standards with an intent to reduce coding
effort, minimize revisions and eliminate functional and performance side
effects on the system. The proposed method would also result in unit-testable
code that can also be easily rolled back and increase team productivity. The
baseline for traditional code review processes using metrics such as code
review duration, bug regression rate, revision count was measured. These
metrics were then compared with results from the proposed code review process
that used structured unit testable templated code. The performance on 2 large
enterprise level applications spanning over 2 years and 9 feature and
maintenance release cycles was evaluated. The structured unit testable
templated code method resulted in a decrease in total code review time,
revision count and coding effort. It also decreased the number of live
production issues caused by code churn or side effects of bug fix when compared
to traditional code review process.
