How comments get you through a code review

Code comments are a big point of discussion in software development. How and where to use comments. Or should you comment at all? Is the code not enough documentation if it is just written well enough? Here I would like to share my own experience with comments.

In the last months I had some code reviews where colleagues looked over my merge requests and gave me feedback. And it happened again and again that they asked questions why I do this or why I decided to go this way.
Often the decisions had a specific reason, for example because it was a customer requirement, a special case that had to be covered or the technology stack had to be kept small.

That is all metadata that would be tedious and time-consuming for reviewers to gather. And at some point, it is no longer a reviewer, it is a software developer 20 years from now who has to maintain the code and can not ask you questions any more . The same applies if you yourself adjust the code again some time later and can not remember your thoughts months ago. This often happens faster than you think. To highlight how fast details disappear here is a current example: This week I set up a new laptop because the old one had a hardware failure. I did all the steps only half a year ago. But without documentation, I would not have been able to reconstruct everything. And where the documentation was missing or incomplete, I had to invest effort to rediscover the required steps.

Example

Here is an example of such a comment. In the code I want to compare if the mixer volume has changed after the user has made changes in the setup dialog.

var setup = await repository.LoadSetup(token);

var volumeOld = setup.Mixers.Contents.Select(mixer=>mixer.Volume).ToList();

setup = Setup.App.RunAsDialog(setup, configuration);

var volumeNew = setup.Mixers.Contents.Select(mixer=>mixer.Volume).ToList();
if (volumeNew == volumeOld)
{
     break;
}
            
ResizeToMixerVolume(setup, volumeOld);

Why do I save the volume in an additional variable instead of just writing the setup into a new variable in the third line? That would be much easier and more elegant. I change this quickly – and the program is broken.

This little comment would have prevented that and everyone would have understood why this way was chosen at the moment.

// We need to copy the volumes, because the original setup is partially mutated by the Setup App.
var volumeOld = setup.Mixers.Contents.Select(mixer=>mixer.Volume).ToList();

If you annotate such prominent places, where a lot of brain work has gone into, you make the code more comprehensible to everyone, including yourself. This way, a reviewer can understand the code without questions and the code becomes more maintainable in the long run.