Code review: A brief overview
Code review is a software development practice where code is systematically examined to ensure it meets specific goals, including quality and security standards. The primary objectives? To identify bugs, uncover code vulnerabilities, enforce organizational coding standards, and improve overall software design.
Some of the work is done through manual reviews, where team members validate each other’s code. But much of the process is now automated, with specialized tools integrated into the pull request workflows and CI/CD pipelines. These automated tools assess code against selected industry standards, allowing only robust, reliable, and maintainable code to move forward.
Code reviews also promote secure coding best practices, contributing to the implementation of a secure SDLC (SSDLC).
In this article, we’ll discuss exactly why code reviews are so important and how to get the most out of them through industry best practices.
Secure Coding Best Practices Cheat Sheet
With curated insights and easy-to-follow code snippets, this 11-page cheat sheet simplifies complex security concepts, empowering every developer to build secure, reliable applications.
Download PDF
Benefits of following a structured approach to code reviews
Making structured, organized, and well-documented code reviews part of your workflows can bring a lot to the table:
Faster development cycles: By taking a structured and automated approach to code review, you’ll detect bugs and security vulnerabilities early, reducing time spent on fixes later.
Consistency across reviews: Standardized review procedures guarantee that all code is evaluated using the same criteria, maintaining uniformity—no matter who is reviewing code.
Improved traceability: A clearly documented code review procedure makes it easier to track changes, tag owners, and monitor decisions.
Risks of skipping (or phoning in!) code reviews
We’ve seen the upsides of well-executed code reviews. But it’s important to remember two things: Not all code reviews will get you the results you want, and skipping code reviews is a high-stakes gamble. Here’s what you’re risking:
Missed flaws: Rushing through code reviews or cutting corners can result in unnoticed bugs, issues, or architectural flaws. The result? Unexpected application behavior or failures in later stages of the SDLC.
Increased technical debt: Poor reviews let inefficient or suboptimal code slip through. That leads to higher future maintenance costs and challenges, ultimately increasing technical debt.
Overlooked security vulnerabilities: Inadequate reviews often focus solely on code quality. But you can’t neglect security because you want to prevent potential breaches, data leaks, downtime, and exploits.
Skipping or rushing through code reviews doesn’t just mean overlooking minor bugs—it can introduce major security risks. According to the latest State of Code Security report from Wiz, 61% of organizations have secrets exposed in public repositories. This means a threat actor scanning public repos could easily discover and exploit cloud credentials, API keys, or access tokens—leading to potential data exfiltration, unauthorized access, and financial losses. A thorough review process can prevent this by ensuring that secrets are never committed to repositories in the first place.
8 Essential code review best practices
Next, let’s take a closer look at code review security best practices and how they help keep your code safe and reliable:
1. Establish clear objectives
A successful code review process must have clear objectives. The first step? Define whether the primary focus is application security, bug detection, code quality, or a combination of these. Well-defined goals help you choose the right automated review tools and guide reviewers in defining priorities.
Use a checklist to promote a structured approach. This way, you’ll foster consistency and thoroughness across all reviews, reducing oversights and guaranteeing best practices are followed.
Well-documented review steps also enable remote teams to participate asynchronously because reviewers can focus on different steps at the same time without confusion. Still, remember to prioritize real-time communication! After all, collaboration is a cornerstone of code reviews. Establish clear procedures and communication channels for sharing constructive feedback.
2. Prioritize key components
Not all components of an application merit the same level of attention. Prioritizing key components during code reviews helps teams quickly identify bugs and security issues in the most critical areas of your application.
To do that, you can generate a list of all components in your application using a software bill of materials (SBOM) tool. Once you have a prioritized list, focus on:
Authentication and authorization components: Vulnerabilities here can lead to significant security breaches.
Components behind core application features: Issues here can result in user complaints and negative reviews.
3. Embrace shift-left security
We all know that deploying applications with security issues can damage your reputation and lead to significant costs.
The solution is shift-left security, which involves implementing code and software security measures as early as possible in the SDLC—before vulnerabilities become costly and difficult to fix.
Embracing shift-left means prioritizing reviews that focus on source code security. These reviews should be short and targeted in order to uncover potential exploits in the code before they become major threats at runtime.
Embracing shift-left security means catching security flaws before they escalate. One major concern highlighted in the Wiz report is that 80% of GitHub workflow permissions in repositories are insecure, often granting excessive privileges. Attackers can exploit these permissions to push malicious code, approve unauthorized pull requests, or even hijack CI/CD pipelines. Ensuring your review process includes security checks for workflow configurations is crucial to preventing these risks from slipping into production.
4. Use ASPM tools
Application security posture management (ASPM) tools assess all application components for misconfigurations, threats, and non-compliance violations during development and leverage insights from the cloud and production environments to prioritize real security risks to developers. Adopting ASPM tools helps surface critical security risks before applications reach production.
By continuously monitoring the security posture of your applications, ASPM offers ongoing feedback to make sure that vulnerabilities are discovered promptly. A review process that integrates 5. Combine the power of SAST, DAST, and IAST for automated reviews
Static application security testing (SAST) tools analyze source code to identify known vulnerabilities.
Dynamic application security testing (DAST) tools test the application during runtime to detect security issues that could be exploited in a live environment.
Interactive application security testing (IAST) tools provide real-time security insights by monitoring the behavior and data flow of an application while users interact with it.
Combining SAST, DAST, and IAST in the code review process supports continuous security coverage throughout the software lifecycle. SAST focuses on pre-deployment security, while DAST and IAST focus on post-deployment security.
The key takeaway? Code reviews shouldn’t stop after deployment. Instead, it’s important to leverage automated tools to monitor and review both the application code and its behavior for you.
This doesn’t mean that automated reviews should fully replace manual reviews, though. In fact, the two approaches complement each other. Automated reviews flag potential issues, and then teams can conduct a deeper inspection to assess and evaluate the findings more thoroughly.
6. Document your findings
After each stage of a code review, document your findings and any relevant observations. When reporting issues, capture specifics such as the nature of the problem, its severity, potential impact, and recommended remediation steps.
This information helps developers understand and resolve issues quickly. Proper documentation also serves as a historical record, giving teams the invaluable opportunity to learn from past mistakes.
7. Promote a quality-first culture
To make code reviews truly effective, all team members should have a solid grasp of coding standards, application security best practices, and industry regulations. Guidelines like the OWASP Top 10, CIS Benchmarks, and ISO/IEC 27001 serve as useful references for writing secure and clean code.
Building a quality-focused mindset means making peer code reviews a habit. When multiple people review the code, it sparks collaboration and brings in fresh perspectives. That mix of expertise helps you spot security gaps, inefficiencies, and architectural flaws.
8. Track metrics and keep improving
Your code review methods should evolve over time based on team feedback and metrics gathered throughout iterations. For example, tracking indicators like defect density helps measure code quality.
A high defect density may indicate the need for stricter coding standards or additional review steps. Look for a balance between thoroughness and speed: Adding more steps can slow down reviews, which may not be ideal for CI/CD pipelines.
The bottom line? By analyzing trends across multiple review cycles, teams can pinpoint bottlenecks and areas for improvement, refining their approach to code security and quality enhancement. Continuous improvement rests on defining the right metrics and consistently reviewing them.
Going beyond the basics with Wiz
Code reviews play a fundamental role in the software development lifecycle, promoting high-quality, secure coding.
Still, applying all the best practices can be difficult, especially when it comes to security. One effective way is to use a code-to-cloud mapping tool like Wiz Code.
Wiz Code scans for code vulnerabilities, IaC misconfigurations, hardcoded secrets, insecure base images, git posture and pipeline secure posture, malware, and more in a single solution. It provides one-click remediation suggestions directly within IDEs, pull requests, and CI/CD pipelines. By using cloud context from production environments to prioritize only real risks to developers, it supports efficient code reviews for security without slowing down development.
Protect your application throughout its lifecycle—schedule a demo today.
Secure your cloud from code to production
Learn why CISOs at the fastest growing companies trust Wiz to accelerate secure cloud development.
