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by mvgoogler 4614 days ago
> partially for inspecting the product, and partially for teaching and inculcating cultural norms

Yes!

I would go further and say that - without discounting their value for catching bugs - the _largest_ benefits of doing code reviews are cultural rather than technical.
2 comments
flurdy 4614 days ago
You pair with people you like and do code reviews with people you don't like (misquoted from someone way smarter than me).

With large teams, especially if distributed or partially outsourced, code reviews can ensure code quality. But also be a total bottle neck if over-bureaucratic and some reviews are of low quality due to lack of context. Often combined with ivory tower architects as well.

In smaller, agile and especially collocated teams code reviews will flag issue unnecessarily late in the process. Just pair from the start instead to ensure no short cuts or dodgy code slips through, and automatically spread the knowledge. If you do not trust two of your developers combined then you do have a serious problem.

You can though in addition have small and short swarming/tripling/quadrupling sessions in front of 1 computer to look at especially important issues.

If you do neither code reviews nor pairing then you are in trouble.

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philangist 4614 days ago
Can you expand on what you mean by this? What cultural benefits are you talking about?
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saraid216 4614 days ago
One of the huge benefits I've found from code reviews is that my reviewer will say, "Actually, we've faced that problem before and there's a solid and proved solution in our utils that handles it already, along with a couple other cases. How about you change it to use that instead?"
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mathattack 4613 days ago
Yes - building on this, I see 4 quick benefits:

1 - Suggestions on where problems have been solved before. (Your point)

2 - Having people say, "Here's the style we use to make this easier to support in the future"

3 - Mentoring on tougher problems, and turning quick hacks into elegant solutions.

4 - QA. (This is the stated benefit, but falls below the other 3)

The key is not to turn code reviews into a bottleneck. If you just view the purpose as any 1 of the 4, you're likely to under-prioritize or over-formalize it.

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rallison 4614 days ago
Additionally, just knowing that code reviews are going to happen often results in developers putting in more effort to submit quality code.
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