Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by philangist 4614 days ago
Can you expand on what you mean by this? What cultural benefits are you talking about?
2 comments

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?"
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.

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