Java Code Review

This is one of most important aspect of quality software development.  'Code Review' question is generally asked for senior java developer or java team lead position. This is very important task performed by team lead to confirm the coding standard of application.

• Adherence to standards and guidelines (This means you should have coding standards set for your project)
• Documentation. All good code must be documented cleanly.
• repetitive code (candidate for refactoring), usage of OOPS principle
• meaningful variable names
• variable and method scopes (private vs public)
• Use of good design patterns (if possible)
• Good test cases associated with the code. Preferably automated test cases.(it is not easy to automate all test cases, though it is desirable. If such is the case, it should document how to test the given functionality)
• Closing all the Streams in finally block
• Exception handling. We prefer to use the Logger to log instead of ex.printStackTrace() in our company
• Remove unused methods/variables
• Look for potential cause of NullPointerException

In addition since you spoke about Java, there are many tools available allow you to analyze the code and check for style and code cleanliness and even potential issues.

• PMD (http://pmd.sourceforge.net/)
• Checkstyle (http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/)
• FindBugs (http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/)

All of these can be configured with an automated build/continuous integration process and check for issues even before you go through a manual code review. I used PMD and Checkstyle at my last project and I was pleasantly surprised that how many issues were we able to discover and fix even before we sat down for a code review.