In all the myriad ways of reviewing code that I have gone through (including not doing it), my favorite is the formal code review we did at MCI.

The author would publish the code (at that time it was C) to a central spot. Then the review facilitator (usuallly someone from the QA or PM group) would schedule the review, and point all the reviewers to the central code. The reviewers were to be given at least 3 days to review the code and prepare their questions/ objections. On the day of the review, the facilitator would poll the invitees to see if they had completed their reviews, and if enough had (at least 3 developers besides the author) the review went on as scheduled.

At the review, an overhead with the code in question, as well as printouts of the code were provided, and the facilitator asked if there were any questions or objections to the code. The questions and the objections were recorded and the author was given a change to explain or rebut. At the end of the review, a go/no-go decision for the code to proceed to implementation was requested, and if consensus was not reached, the date for the next review was discussed.

This was a huge improvement over the previous way we had done them, which was for a bunch of people to get together in a conference room and have the code read to them line by line.

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