code-review skill

Overview

This skill provides a practical, structured code review checklist and template tailored for Java projects. It distills best practices for quality, safety, performance, security, and testing into actionable review steps. The skill is focused on producing constructive, prioritized feedback and a consistent review report format.

How this skill works

The skill inspects code against a concise checklist covering coding style, naming, duplication, logic clarity, null-safety, boundary checks, exception handling, concurrency, resource management, performance, security, and test coverage. It generates a structured review output with sections for severe issues, improvement suggestions, positives, and an overall assessment. Reviewers receive prioritized, concrete recommendations and optional example code snippets when fixes are non-trivial.

When to use it

• Before merging feature branches into main or release branches
• During pull request reviews to ensure consistency and risk reduction
• For periodic codebase health checks and refactor validation
• When onboarding new team members to enforce style and design norms
• Prior to performance-sensitive releases or security audits

Best practices

• Focus on constructive, specific feedback and include suggested fixes or code samples
• Prioritize findings: mark critical defects separately from stylistic suggestions
• Verify null-safety and boundary conditions where dereferences or indexing occur
• Check for duplicated logic and prefer extracting reusable methods or utilities
• Validate exception handling paths and ensure resources are closed reliably
• Ensure tests cover core logic, edge cases, and failure scenarios

Example use cases

• Review a pull request implementing a new REST endpoint to catch SQL injection and missing permission checks
• Evaluate a refactor that extracts shared logic to prevent accidental duplication and regressions
• Audit concurrency fixes to confirm thread-safety and absence of deadlock risks
• Assess performance hotspots by reviewing algorithm choices and database query patterns
• Validate test coverage after adding new business rules or boundary conditions

FAQ