[eduren]

>This post concedes that code reviews are better for the more fluffy ends -- teamwork, openness, social recognition, but given their high costs, I'd rather achieve even these soft goals in other ways than to impede my team's delivery potential.

What techniques have you found effective for improving the soft goals in the context of software (genuinely curious)? Are we talking more conventional management/business concepts or something a bit more loosely defined?

[wellpast]

Not sure how to formalize but the team's I've worked on have generally negotiated mutual respect, openness, and teamwork by collaborating on the things of greater import -- the architecture, domain conceptualization, etc. And peer code reviews in some cases tend to work against these goals--because you tend to be down in the weeds of LOC, bike-shedding, arguing over the equivalents of tabbing and spacing or whether a line could be more functionally expressed, e.g....

[thrownaway2424]

Well perhaps another part of Google's code review culture is important, then: proposed changes must be style compliant, must compile, must have tests, and all the tests must pass before anyone will bother looking at them. If I got a code review (at Google) that was incorrectly indented, there would be a little red chip in the review UI that indicated such style violation, and I would just reply "Please fix" and not look at it again until the next revision.

In the absence of a strong style guide and testing culture then I agree code reviews can get bogged down in bikeshedding. At Google that doesn't seem to happen because the style guide for each language is quite prescriptive. For Go, no change will be reviewed that hasn't passed through gofmt, and so forth. And on the flip side you can have confidence that if your change has gone through gofmt, there's not going to be any discussion about the formatting.

[alxndr]

What UI does Google use for code review?