Seeking feedback: Should Code Reviews be allowed here?

Question

User Antony Naveen has been asking questions to review his Selenium code.

Example questions:

• Can you check this code?
• Can you check this POM design Pattern?

One of these questions was put on hold as unclear what you are asking.

As SE has codereview.SE I would like to welcome questions like this, because its a way to learn both ways. Thinking about how I would solve this is pretty interesting and valuable to a larger audience to learn from our train of thoughts.

Maybe we should think about a format so that these questions are clear as code reviews.

How should I edit them so that the question is acceptable?

• Title
• Question
• Code example
• Tags to add

Or if they aren't salvageable for our site, what should be done with them?

Answer 1

I have a couple uncollected thoughts on it. I'd certainly welcome others to jump in with their own:

• While Code Review Stack Exchange exists, it is an experiment by the Network. (As are Puzzling and Code Golf.) I would not necessarily say that because it exists, we should welcome questions of the sort. Of course, at the same time, I would not say that we shouldn't welcome them either. Simply that CRSE's existence doesn't factor into the decision.
• We as a community get to decide what we want to allow and not allow (barring an explicit elbow from the sky, and I really don't think Shog or Robert are planning to do that to a community that is trying to grow.) It's exactly posts like this that allow us to get the ball rolling on standardizing such posts, so thank you!
• One of the reasons CRSE is considered an experiment is that most sites take into consideration how helpful a question/answer pairing is going to be for future visitors. Historically, this site has followed the trend of other sites which is that questions should continue to be very helpful to future visitors. Code review questions are generally not as useful to future visitors.
• Titles should focus on what the real problem is. We don't want a code dump and ask it to be reviewed. The question should have clearly defined parameters: I'm trying to FOO. Inputs are BAR and BAZ. Outputs are BAQ.
• We should follow the wisdom of CRSE in that requests for Code Review should be functional already. Don't ask us to just fix broken code.
• At CRSE, you're generally not allowed to say "I'm looking for help with X specifically - so if you see things about Y in my code, don't bother saying anything about it." You have to take the entire review. I think if we're going to allow this, we should follow that as well. One of the major reasons for this is that it helps future visitors the most, and I really don't think we should lose sight of that aspect of our mission.
• We should expect askers to indicate why they feel the code needs to be reviewed. Even though we don't let them X/Y the review and everything is on the table, it would be good if we knew why they felt it needed a second set of eyes in the first place.
• Categorically deny a dump of purely code. I'd venture to say that as a rule of thumb, there should be more text than code.
• I feel a code-review tag would be a meta tag and that we shouldn't use it. But at the same time, it makes me wonder if maybe it is okay to do so - it would be appropriate to the content, at least, and it would be no more meta than other sites that use story-identification tags.

Those are what come off the top of my head. I'll be adding to this more if I get a chance, but I strongly encourage other answers. I think this is an important topic for us to discuss and don't want anyone to be like "corsiKa has spoken! Our input is no longer needed on the matter." Besides, with this stupid blue gravitar (instead of my old, AWESOME purple one...) who can take me seriously anymore?

Answer 2

I am all for helping people, but SE has a variety of software-related sites so that they can specialize.

When a novice Selenium Webdriver user comes here with a question about how to write Java code, we tend to send them elsewhere because the question isn't about testing. Yes, test automation usually involves programming, but this site specializes in those aspects of testing that do not overlap with general programming. Otherwise we end up accepting any question that might appear in Stack Overflow.

A similar argument holds for code reviews.

I also worry about an onslaught of code review requests from students seeking homework help. We get enough of that kind of thing already.

Answer 3

To me, I feel like we are pushing some of the better questions and answers away from the site purely because it doesn't fit the exact mold or because another SE can answer it.

By accepting code review questions we are allowing answers to contain information that is pertinent to future users regarding principles and techniques and not solely about fixing their small one-off problem.

Could we start doing this with all questions? Probably, yes. But if we start critiquing all code posted here it will likely push away more users than it would help.

Code Review Questions are popular

Look at the stats on them. Most of the code review questions have at least one solid answer, they have mainly been upvoted and they have a higher view count than a lot of the questions.

Code Review Questions helps future users

They are about principles, specific to QA Development. These are transferable skills regardless of what the next user is attempting to accomplish these questions will help them.

Should all CR questions be accepted?

No, we should have guidelines. If you're wanting specifics to your code quality that should be migrated to CR.SE. But if the question is about POM, BDD, TDD, Design Structures specific to QA or other areas specific to QA than those, in my opinion, should be accepted.

At the end of the day, we are turning down what is in my eyes a valuable resource for future users. The main question I have is why? What harm would come from leaving these questions open?