Integrating Code Review into Your DevOps Cycle: A 2024 Practical Guide

DevOps is the combination of software development and operations processes with the goal of maximizing efficiency. It is a methodology and a mindset that, when employed effectively, serves to streamline and optimize the delivery of software including code review.

The larger the organization and the larger the software development project, the greater the chance of inefficiency, error, or miscommunication. For companies whose fortunes are based in large part on the quality and reliability of their software estate, these issues can be highly damaging.

For this reason, a key component of the DevOps cycle is the implementation of code review processes. This allows DevOps teams to assess code quality, promote collaboration, and pinpoint and resolve issues before problems occur when the stakes are highest. 

This article is a practical guide to some best practices when integrating code review across the key stages of the DevOps cycle.

Building a Code Review Culture

Setting the Standard

Consider the people accountable for code review. Are they aware of feedback from user testing? Do they know which bugs it is imperative to identify? Do they have a means of overseeing commits and pull requests by other developers?

A code review guideline defines acceptable code quality and assessment tools and processes.

A guideline serves as a single source of truth, defining acceptable code quality as well as tools & processes for assessing that quality.

Finally, do not forget to make your code review guideline accessible to everyone who needs it. Take a look at Google’s Code Review Standard as an example.

Code Review as Collaboration

Make impactful sessions a standard practice for every sprint and for every team. Developers can peer-review code against the organization’s guidelines, with further checks completed by experienced team leads. This ensures quality control while also encouraging team interaction and learning, further enhancing the developer experience.

Code review is a collaborative process, so those involved must be encouraged to voice opinions and offer constructive feedback where they see issues.

Keep in mind that this process aims to deliver better software faster, which occurs best when developers volunteer their insight and experience.

The Code Review Toolbox

Effective code review has the most impact during the planning, building, and testing phases of the DevOps cycle. It enables the resolution of issues before deployment, minimizing the need for costly changes later.

Equip your team with tools to automate and accelerate the review process at these critical stages of the DevOps cycle.

Version Control and Code Review

Throughout the development, teams rely on version control systems such as Gitlab, Git, or BitBucket to enable developers to manage different versions of their codebase. 

This is where much of the work of both coding and reviewing is done. Team leads check on these platforms to approve and deploy code.

Understanding trends and identifying systemic issues in code delivery demands significant time and manual effort.

Specialized tools, however, provide transparency into patterns of developer activity and insights into their impact on code quality and maintainability. Unlocking strategic data from the review process in this way eliminates the manual effort required when working with a version control system alone.

BlueOptima’s Team Lead Dashboard, for example, provides visibility into commit and pull request activity to identify bottlenecks that may be occurring in development and in the review process itself. 

Final Checks

Across the DevOps lifecycle, multiple development projects may be running in tandem. This adds to the complexity of running a thorough and consistent process.

To identify the most critical vulnerabilities before deployment, adopt a tool capable of analysis at a scale that feeds back data to improve future development cycles.

BlueOptima’s Code Insights is an example of an automated tool that scans your software estate for code changes to identify, categorize, and rank vulnerability issues while providing historical analysis to inform future planning.

Conclusion

This guide aims to support your first steps toward truly embedding code review into your DevOps cycle. The relationship between these processes will evolve, revealing what works and what doesn’t over time.

Initiating this relationship promptly with appropriate tools will expedite the delivery of superior software.

See how BlueOptima can support your DevOps team.