Forcing a checklist upon all reviewers isn't what the article is all about, but rather it's about one developer's way of organizing his own personal process for doing code review so he doesn't forget something.
If I have a huge change in front of me, and I know that I tend to look for certain things, I could certainly try to look for all those in one go. That's error-prone, though. Might forget something, or get bogged down in syntactical stuff and miss something important. However, with a little personal checklist in front of me, I can go "Okay, I'm done looking at syntax. Now let's make sure that there's no off-by-ones." Leads to better organization of thoughts.
Lists in general are great for organizing thoughts. Being able to check items off the list helps focus thoughts and offload the overhead of keeping track of progress to something better suited to the task.
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Exactly.
Forcing a checklist upon all reviewers isn't what the article is all about, but rather it's about one developer's way of organizing his own personal process for doing code review so he doesn't forget something.
If I have a huge change in front of me, and I know that I tend to look for certain things, I could certainly try to look for all those in one go. That's error-prone, though. Might forget something, or get bogged down in syntactical stuff and miss something important. However, with a little personal checklist in front of me, I can go "Okay, I'm done looking at syntax. Now let's make sure that there's no off-by-ones." Leads to better organization of thoughts.
Lists in general are great for organizing thoughts. Being able to check items off the list helps focus thoughts and offload the overhead of keeping track of progress to something better suited to the task.