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Do testers do code reviews?

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This weekend on the flight from Seattle to Ireland I finally got to catch up on some reading. One of the books I grabbed off the shelf that I hadn't gotten around to reading yet was Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review by Jason Cohen. The book is 160 pages packed with great information, and I highly recommend it for some fresh perspectives of the value or ideas on improving code reviews. For decades the industry collected mounds of empirical data that pretty clearly illustrates the value of code reviews in a software development lifecycle in the early detection and removal of issues and anomalies. With the industry wide push to drive quality upstream via approaches such as agile programming and test driven development there is a resurgence of effort by developers to engage in more frequent code reviews.

Many people seem assume the primary reason why Microsoft (and other companies) is recruiting more technically skills testers is simply to automate tests. But, in fact, many testers at the company engaged in writing test automation long before our efforts towards engineering excellence. The skills and knowledge that people who have a much deeper understanding of the 'system' bring to an organization extends well beyond their ability to write automation.

But, should testers be performing code reviews? In my opinion, code reviews are simply another approach in a myriad of approaches to testing a software project, and professional testers should be able to engage the testing effort from a variety of testing perspectives.

Testers who participate in project code reviews are part of the team effort to drive quality upstream, reduce certain classes of issues before they are checked into the build, improve overall long-term maintainability of the code base, and effectively reduce long term costs. Just as testers participate in the early stages of the design and requirements phase of a project to provide valuable input, some testers on every team should engage in code reviews either with other developers, or perhaps as the primary reviewers of project code. Some people will argue that testers may be biased by participating in code reviews and lose the 'customer' perspective. This may be true in some cases, but I suspect that most professional testers clearly understand the different classes of issues that are more easily found in a code review versus other approaches of testing. But, testers who engage in code reviews tend to have a much deeper understanding of the overall project, and they are also able to identify potential areas of the code that may be more problematic and focus additional testing approaches in those areas.

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