How Crucial Are Code Reviews?

How can organizations encourage a focus on the impact of code on maintenance, performance, and consistency during code reviews?
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Comments

[Martin Kobimbo]

It is important to foster a constructive feedback culture and let code reviews be seen as an opportunity to learn rather than devs feeling like a code review is a crucifying event where they are the victims.

[Tai Kedzierski]

There was a good post on this by @scastiel a few months ago

dev.to/scastiel/13-tips-for-better...

[Tai Kedzierski]

I suspect if you find yourself doubting the usefulness of code reviews, you've probably had bad reviewers not focusing on the important things...

For my part I find that code reviews:

• with the right kind of feedback code review enables mentoring
• catch obvious misunderstandings
• ensure team members are following a style that remains readable (code is for humans, not for machines. If it's unmaintainable, it will bite you one day)
• catches ill-practice and "i can get away with this small thing" coding (we all do it, even seniors, don't be shy, there really are just some days like that...)
  • your WIP item you forgot to revisit? 😉

That's just a few things off the top of my head.

With the wrong kind of feedback (uninformative, terse, accusatory), code review can turn into a flex- and blame- game. That's not a problem with CR - it's something to address with the participants...

[Andrew Baisden]

Very important because they give everyone an indication of the level of coding a developer has and what areas they can improve in. This will help the team overall and increase everyones coding ability.