[bcoughlan]

Developers absolutely miss the big picture because they're mired in the tiny details. There is a tendency towards perfectionism.

That said many of us spend much of our time maintaining the half baked features of devs long gone. It's time consuming. It's reverse engineering, support cases, meetings, bug fixing, digging through vague logs, workarounds, knowledge transfers and there's never the political will to re-do it plus it's more than twice the work because you have to migrate existing customer workflows. It is work that is neither rewarding nor rewarded.

With that in mind there are categories of things that should be tackled upfront. Besides glaring bugs there is security holes, traceability, auditing, overengineering, real world performance, documentation, preventing bloat and my pet peeve - changes that slow down development by requiring duplicated work or affecting the ability to run locally.

The business pressure encourages developers to skip these because usually someone else will end up dealing with the mess.

[zoomablemind]

> ...There is a tendency towards perfectionism.

I see the perfectionism as a byproduct of a disbalanced review process.

Devs will defensively go into 'refinement' just to stave off a bounce at what is being perceived as a pedantic/senior/superior review.

If there's a practical and streamlined review process, it signals properly to devs a degree of 'good enough'.

[bcoughlan]

I have been the pedantic reviewer. It took time to learn good code review practices and grow them into the work culture, to let go of matter-of-style issues (where I can't argue an objective benefit for the change).

Asynchronous text-based code reviews suffer from an empathy problem also. A lot of the pedantic or ego attitudes drop away when you have to discuss it face to face. Nowadays I'll often opt for a call with the team member if I think there will be a lot of comments. Better yet is to do some pair programming in advance of the code review to avoid major disagreements and discarded work.