Felix’s project produced a prototype but was not actually usable. We have another student this fall working on taking things from prototype to production.

Is there an update on this checklist extension? The last information I have been able to find is 5 months old.

I’m a big fan of incorporating linting and other static analysis into the process, too. A lot of the items that I check at code review time are the ones which are harder to automate. The tooling for static analysis are improving every day, though, so I’m looking forward to the day when I only have to argue about the high level concepts and can let a computer find all the bugs.

We participate in a bunch of student projects courses, and Felix Sung from MIT is currently working on building an extension that would let users create and use checklists inside Review Board. We can’t guarantee any kind of timeframe for when it will be ready, but as you might expect, this is something that I’m pretty excited about myself, too!

We do a lot of upfront design for new features, but a lot of the time we’re making incremental improvements to existing UIs. If we’re just adding a new check-box to an existing page, it probably doesn’t need a ton of design work (it’s faster to just write the code than it is to make a mock-up). Since I’m using these at the time of code review (as opposed to at design phase), those are the sorts of changes where I pull out my limited “visual design” checklist.

Several studies (google it) shows that not more than 150-200 lines of code should be reviewed per hour, becuse the mind starts to loose foucs.

I only use mentally checklists today but I will definitely give it a try.

If you are thinking about the design part of things during a CR, your process can probably be improved. CRs should be about code that implements existing designs/ideas etc and doesn’t actually introduce big things. However, sometimes edge cases are only surfaced when you are debugging/working on code, in wich case adding UI elements/user facing stuff that hasn’t been designed may make sense.

Oh, I just realized that you mostly work on OS.. in which I’ve heard nobody designs anything up front (or not much), just writes code – I can see these lists making sense in that context.