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by paradite 1572 days ago
Requiring screen recording isn't about lack of trust or lack of competence. Rather it's a way of eliminating information asymmetry between the author and the reviewer:

- The author might have checked that the code works fine (A) or haven't done it (B).

- The reviewer might decide to run the code locally (1) or not (2).

Combination A1 results in duplicate effort. Combinations A2 and B1 are perfect. Combination B2 results in potential bugs.

The MR standard merely eliminating the combinatorial possibilities by sharing information between the author and the reviewer automatically. The end result is that both parties know A2 is the process that the other person follows.

1 comments

All you have to do in a code review is review the code. You do not have to run the code nor should you be unless it is a very tiny project. It is the developers responsibility to test the functionality and get it ready for the QA process. If there is a dedicated QA that can test their functionality then the QA is responsible for testing on that front. The code reviewer is not supposed to be testing the feature works as intended for product. The manager of the team or product or client or stakeholder would be the ones testing yhe functionality and giving it a go ahead. It is not the job of the code reviewer to do that. It means you have not taught your developers the set of standards and practices to follow. If you have to get a screen recording of a feature working (probbaly in local or dev so its as useful as a unit test) then you or whoever is responsible has failed at creating a proper software development process
You are 100% right and I agree with you completely.

I have failed to create a proper software development process.

Well I apologize if I came off as harsh. I don’t mean to say you specifically. I just adamantly believe that we need to work towards process that allow you to trust the developer. Every situation is unique however and I cannot speak on all but I do think screen recording proof of work is not useful. Also if people are forced to screen record there us no scalability in projects software development