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by regularfry 917 days ago
That's just blame diffusion though. No review is guaranteed to catch issues like that, all it does is say "well we followed The Process, guess it sucks that one got through" when something bad inevitably makes it to production because the reviewer didn't have the specific knowledge to catch the specific problem. That's more likely to happen when the scope of a review is limited to a diff - either implicitly because that's all the tooling shows you, or explicitly because of "why should I fix code I didn't write on this ticket" reactions to review feedback.

That's not to say blame diffusion is without value! You might need it to avoid toxicity around the team. But that's a different problem.

1 comments

It's not "blame diffusion", it's risk management. Two sets of eyes are more likely to catch issues than one, and if I specifically know that some part of the code is tricky and person X is familiar with that part of the code, I might even ask that specific person to review.

Honestly, it sounds like you have a very cavalier attitude towards breaking production. That might work in some settings, but definitely not all of them.