My thoughts on code reviews

The importance of coding standards have been grossly undermined by most of the organizations while developing software applications.Hence in most of the software applications, the coding styles differ from programmer to programmer even though all the programmers may be working on the same application and hence leads to inconsistent coding styles.Consistency in the coding style always ensures that a programmer quickly understand the code with much ease.This helps in maintainability of the code.Apart from style, coding standards also covers the typical do's and don't of the programming language and enforce constraints to avoid inefficient programming practice.Although peer review helps to some extent it fails to completely eradicate the inconsistencies in coding standards.Also it wastes a lot of time of the person reviewing the code.Hence its essential to have an automated code review tool which can help the programmer to review the code before submitting it for peer review.With an automated code review tool half the work is already done before the peer review and hence saves a lot of time.Also using a tool forces the programmer ito adhere to the coding standards and there no chance of escape as would be the case in peer review as it is done by humans.