Code review challenges

Have tried to capture and compile here the objective of code reviews and the approach for fulfilling the same in a tangible and recordable fashion. Apart from other concomitant benefits of reviewing code like minimizing defects, the primary benefits would easily be the following :

* verify that the code is production quality / release-worthy
* ensure that the way code written by different people follows a standard skeleton
* ensure that each individual programmer continually writes better quality and more maintainable code

But it's not easy - because of the inconspicuous yet overwhelming existence of the programmer's ego or Cognitive dissonance.

I came across an interesting article here that claims to take away the pain from the code review process. And probably a simple checklist like this could make the process more structured.

The other challenge is to quantify change, of course on the +ve side of the number line .. I guess the only way to do that is break down the checklist into much more granular components. For instance, capture design, approach (creative, fast, etc) , unit testing, comments, performance, legibility, maintainability, version control, etc and the degree of all these and have either a boolean or scale rating for each aspect and then progressively track an individual's ratings to see if the methodology needs to be tweaked.