Introduction
Code reviews can often find and remove common vulnerabilities such as format string exploits, race conditions, memory leaks and buffer overflows, thereby improving software security. Online software repositories based on Subversion (with Redmine or Trac), Mercurial, Git or others allow groups of individuals to collaboratively review code. Additionally, specific tools for collaborative code review can facilitate the code review process.
Automated code reviewing software lessens the task of reviewing large chunks of code on the developer by systematically checking source code for known vulnerabilities. A recent study by VDC Research reports that 17.6% of the embedded software engineers surveyed currently use automated tools for peer code review and 23.7% expect to use them within 2 years.
Capers Jones' ongoing analysis of over 12,000 software development projects showed that the latent defect discovery rate of formal inspection is in the 60-65% range. For informal inspection, the figure is less than 50%. The latent defect discovery rate for most forms of testing is about 30%.
Typical code review rates are about 150 lines of code per hour. Inspecting and reviewing more than a few hundred lines of code per hour for critical software (such as safety critical embedded software) may be too fast to find errors. Industry data indicates that code reviews can accomplish at most an 85% defect removal rate with an average rate of about 65%.
The types of defects detected in code reviews have also been studied. Based on empirical evidence it seems that up to 75% of code review defects affect software evolvability rather than functionality making code reviews an excellent tool for software companies with long product or system life cycles.
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