Clean Code Cheat Sheet for Senior Developers in Daily PR Reviews

Code Review Smells and Heuristics

Ali Zeynalli
4 min readJan 9, 2024
Photo by Anders Jildén on Unsplash

Nowadays, one of the most important skills that companies demand from Software Engineers (mainly from Senior level…) is to deliver high quality code reviews on iterative and incremental manner. That means with each PR Review Developers are asked to improve quality of the to-be-merged code again and again. In this post I will try to point out the basic principles that each Developer should have in mind when doing refactoring or review. If you want to see practical implementation of these points on code piece, check my this other blog:
Ultimate Guide to Clean Code with over 30 Java Refactoring Examples

Let us have a look at these points topic by topic:

1.Meaningful Names

Use intention revealing names: the method or variable names should explain itself what its intention is before even looking at code implementation.

Class names should be noun or noun phrase.

Method names should be verb.

Pick one word for each concept: get, retrieve, fetch are interchangeable, choose one and use only it for all same actions.

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Ali Zeynalli

IT-Architect | BMW Group | M.Sc. Technical University of Berlin