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Confessions of a programmer: I hate code review (2010)

• mavelikara 8y ago
  (2010)
• geoffmunn 8y ago
  Code reviews, aka opportunities for dickheads to demonstrate how clever they are. "Did you know you can replace that entire function with a regex?"
  • tristanperry 8y ago
    I think this comes down to team culture and morale. This certainly does happen in a team with a bad culture/morale, but IMO it's just a symptom of the wider issues. But yep, code reviews do make situations with bad morale worse IMO.
  • closeparen 8y ago
    Mediocre code review is a human linter; decent code review catches obvious bugs; good code review catches subtle bugs; great code review teaches you something. I’m always excited to learn (or teach) when there’s a better way to write something. Even if not adopted, the surrounding discussion is a boon to future readers. If people are giving crazy suggestions, or resenting good ones, something is seriously wrong with your team.
• rumcajz 8y ago
  In the end this boils down to the problem of interruptions. People often discuss the topic with smalltalk and such in mind: https://heeris.id.au/trinkets/ProgrammerInterrupted.png https://heeris.id.au/trinkets/ProgrammerInterrupted.png The code reviews go more to the core of the problem. Interruptions are often necessary but, for the person being interrupted, they always suck. How much should we try to learn to multitask? Where's the boundary where it stops being useful and starts being toxic?
• creed0r 8y ago
  "However, if a reviewer comes back with significant comments on the code I sent out"... This is what I see day in day out: we have a lot of tooling for the reviewing process but don't seem to have any or very little tooling for the design/discussion phase _before_ someone starts implementing...
• zaksoup 8y ago
  I've found that favoring full time pair programming and not reviewing work that was soloed upon unless the author explicitly asked for it because of self-identified uncertainty or caution has resulted in a better workflow with little to no actual hit to quality. Additionally, proper test-driving and testing practices are incredibly effective ways to enforce high quality code. Again, this comes down to culture and practices. Teaching and encouraging good testing will pay off far more than enforcing "two pairs of eyes" type rules. My experience is that code review is great at linting, nit-picking, and causing arguments about idiom. The times a bug was okayed with 8 different :thumbs-up: or "lgtm" on the PR in github are uncountable. It's not that code review doesn't work, because I'm sure it often catches plenty of bugs, it's just that I have no reason to believe it's more reliable than pairing or letting authors ask for help explicitly when they need it. Disclaimer: I spent my formative years at Pivotal Labs. Yadah Yadah Yadah it's a cult of pair programmers so something about a grain of salt.
  • XorNot 8y ago
    This sort of thing is why I'm all in on strictly, program-enforced code-style. It closes off the single most common, most useless line of argument in code reviews that there is. What I do wonder about is what else can be done to bring tooling into the process in a productive way. I'm imagining something like the Go and Rust playgrounds where reviewers actually contribute test-cases or something to the real code base.
  • barbs 8y ago
    Pair-programming 100% of the time sounds like a nightmare to me. I need uninterrupted focus - something I can't do with someone else there constantly, even if we're working on the same thing
    • rabidrat 8y ago
      Have you actually tried it? It's different than you think. (At least it has been for me).
• erwan 8y ago
  I love code-reviews. With the right people, they can be useful both to achieve high-standards of code quality and also improve your own engineering process. The requirements are quite high, I think you need some combination of the following: 1. Both reviewer and reviewee are focusing on getting the best outcome possible, in good faith and with generosity. 2. The reviewer concedes that there can be equally valid approaches to a given problem or taste wrt. aesthetics. They do not try to gratuitously force their style upon the reviewee. The reciprocal must hold as well. 3.The reviewer makes practical suggestions and ideally accompany their comments with snippets of code. They involve themselves into being part of the solution. 4. The reviewer focuses on the substance of the pull request. That means putting in the time to understand the real logic, putting themselves in the shoes of the reviewee (with their help), and trying to challenge it so that the limitations of the approach are known and documented. 5. The reviewee makes an effort at slicing their request into readable and compact sub-PRs if needed. Similarly, the reviewer makes a best-effort attempt at starting their review within a reasonable time. Those are central aspects of a productive engineering culture anyway. You only need to find someone else that shares those "values" (i.e focusing on the best outcome possible as a sort of devotion to Engineering - so to speak) to grow this attitude within your company.
  • Vinnl 8y ago
    I think in such a situation, receiving a review is great, even though the downsides mentioned in the article ("what am I going to do while I wait for the review to come in?") are still presents. However, it doesn't do away with how unsatisfying performing a review is. If I spend a day doing code reviews, that is not an enjoyable day to me. This is regardless of how useful I feel it is; it's just not a job I enjoy doing. It'd be nice if there was some change we could make to make it a more pleasant aspect of the job.
    • cimmanom 8y ago
      While you wait for code review you work on another ticket. What kind of screwy engineering process assumes that code review is instantaneous and doesn’t give you something else to do in parallel?
• xiphias2 8y ago
  ,,Reviewing code is one of those things that I would enjoy if I had infinite time, but that I find a nuisance when I don't.'' I can't really imagine any work that can be more important than code review for other people. This is the way Linus can have a 100x leverage on the Linux code base. This is the most important and hardest work in the Bitcoin code base as well, probably apart from cryptography research. I think the bigger problem is that code reviewing may be not well compensated, not that it's not important.
  • stefan_ 8y ago
    The compensation, in Linux anyways, is that others will review your code if you review theirs. So the motivation to review stuff on the mailing list is purely that you need someone to review your code to get it in. It sounds like quid pro quo but I found the level of review (e.g. for the DRM subsystem) to be excellent, even if it's one AMD eng reviewing some other AMD engineers code in the AMD specific code.
• eridius 8y ago
  You know what I hate more than code review? Shipping bugs. The author of this piece admits that they have to change the code they write in response to comments. This means the code review is flagging areas of improvement. Surely the resulting code is better than the original code (otherwise I'd expect the author to push back on the comments instead of implementing bad suggestion). Similarly, when acting as the code reviewer, the author is giving feedback to others (rather than just rubber-stamping the PR), and presumably that feedback is implemented. So code review seems to be doing its job here. It's producing better code. Ultimately I think the problem is revealed at the end, where the author says they feel like code review is optional. If you think it's optional, then the delays inherent in review are going to feel like artificial slowdowns. The better way to think about it is that code review simply isn't optional. Yes it can be a pain, and there's a lot of friction in the process, and our tooling kinda sucks for it. But it's a necessary step. I can't even begin to count how many bugs my team has avoided shipping due to code review. And I always get really annoyed when I run across a bug that should have been caught in code review but wasn't for whatever reason (perhaps a more junior coder did the review and therefore missed stuff that a more senior coder would have caught). Code review stops bugs before they happen. And the best bug is the one that was never shipped to customers.
  • onion2k 8y ago
    Surely the resulting code is better than the original code (otherwise I'd expect the author to push back on the comments instead of implementing bad suggestion). Only if the author cares enough about the code. I've implemented things I know are bad in the past because the politics of pushing back aren't worthwhile. Especially if you work in an environment where your review is driven by the opinion of your colleagues (eg stack ranking). "Code reviews are painful" are often a sign of bad team dynamics or a culture of politically motivated decisions.
  • lowercased 8y ago
    much like 'testing', the code will get reviewed at some point - either during a crisis, or before it goes out.
  • falsedan 8y ago
• fzeroracer 8y ago
  For me, I've never had an issue context switching from various branches and PRs. After a moment or two of looking through my notes and my code I can quickly get back up to speed with what I was doing. The issue I end up taking with code review is cases where reviewers end up forcing their own stylistic choices to the detriment of my time. Insisting that all equal signs be lined up, insisting that variables must be spaced in a very certain way etc. I'm diligent at following the style guide for whatever language I'm working in, but the most annoying code reviewer I had to deal with would specifically call out things that were up to the individual developers.
  • sethammons 8y ago
    Auto code formatters for the win. If that is not an option, maybe a line in the style doc that says "shall" vs "may" (ie, things that are and are not kick backable).
• lowercased 8y ago
  Rant... Was nominal lead on a smallish project a couple months back, with 2 other folks. Worked with one before, one I hadn't worked with before. We're all remote, and the 'new' guy started doing 'code review' on code before he had a running environment. We'd taken over another codebase, and he was pretty up-front about wanting to adopt/enforce certain stylistic standards, which... to me, I don't particularly care about as much (on the PHP side of things, PSR-2, in this case). We're all remote, so we had a call - a couple actually - and I indicated I didn't care all that much, but he was free to make changes as he saw fit, as long as 1) he got a working environment up and running, 2) he was also spending time writing some tests around the code as he explored it, to have a firmer understanding of what was going on, and 3) he didn't break any existing tests (or new ones that were developed). I swear that I don't think he'd actually had a working copy of the project, but was still committing code. Not a lot, but ... it broke tests. It broke stuff that was not 'tested' in an automated way yet, but was testable by running the app, and I think he'd just not bothered to test it at all. But... hey - look at the formatting! Look - spaces, not tabs! - how useful when someone else is having to go back and debug your crap. I received a couple small lectures on variable naming and the importance of descriptive variable names. function getListOfUsersForCompany() { $res = db::query('whatever query'); return $res; } Apparently, that $res is confusing and 'bad practice' because it's "hard to reason" about what's going on there. Literally 2 line methods with an internal placeholder variable (which also had some working functional tests around them) - those were being criticized by someone who had committed test-breaking code multiple times. In all this, I kept having to figure out how much of my reaction was because my code was being criticized, vs what the criticisms were. I got accused of taking things 'personally', but I kept coming back to 'working tests broke with these changes', and in my mind, that this code was considered somehow 'better' because it more closely followed a stylistic 'standard' was bothersome. Working tests should a standard we strive for too, right? I have worked with some folks who had a real eye for analysis - remote or colo pairing on problems has helped reason out issues that I know I've missed. And when I'm pairing or doing a requested review, cosmetic style tends to be the last thing I'll bring up, because it generally has the least impact on something. Much prefer to have someone spend time writing tests and/or docs and/or insightful comments vs reformatting. When I've refactored with someone to make something more testable, better naming/comments/docs tends to flow out of that refactoring anyway. While I understand formatting is often not that big of burden, especially with modern IDEs, it's also not terribly high value on many projects. I'm primarily speaking on projects I've come in to where there's already extant code - in this case, we had taken on a very weird hybrid of 2 PHP frameworks and 2 JS frameworks (some screens used raw vue, some compiled vue, and some compiled angular).
• weissguy68 8y ago
  Nelson is brilliant!
• koala_man 8y ago
  The arguments essentially boil down to: * "I don't have time to review people's code, I just want to code" * "I don't have time to have my code reviewed, because if it's bad I'd have to fix it" This really mirrors people's complaints about unit testing: * "I don't have time to write tests, I just want to code" * "I don't have time to run tests. If they're failing I'd have to fix it" It also mirrors the 19th century complaints from surgeons who didn't have time to wash their hands, because they had a lot of surgeries to perform...
  • walterstucco 8y ago
    1 - hospitals in US still have to get their employees to wash hands in 2018 2 - washing hands had a major impact on saving lives, tests and CR have not improved coding in a measurable way
  • vfc1 8y ago
    The problem is that most tests break frequently not because of bugs, but because of some environment dependency that changed. The tests break and we have to fix them not because a bug was found, but because something else changed that affected the test. Most of the time spent with tests is not to catch bugs. When was the last time that you caught a significant bug with a test?
    • sethammons 8y ago
      For us, a failing unit test is almost always a bug. Lots of people write terrible unit tests. Too much mocking, asserting methods called, etc. Brittle. Test the edge of your public interface. Supporting methods only need specific unit tests if they are sufficiently complex. If your unit's interface changes or it's behavior changes, it should fail. That is a good thing.
      • vfc1 8y ago
        think there is a lot of religious-like thinking when it comes down to tests: many people swear by them even against all the day to day proof to the contrary that they are really not that useful at the application level. I think if we are shipping a framework to thousands of users its great that it has unit tests, but if its an in-house application built by a team of 10 developers, I doubt that the tests are doing anything useful. But what happens is that these best practices that are used by developers of libraries are then used blindly at the level of application code, without pausing to think if those are indeed best practices in that particular context. Developing software at the leaves of the dependency tree (the application) is very different than developing libraries. Some things are the same while many others are not. The end result in practice is a lot of wasted time and effort spent at the application level writing bad tests that yield no results, all in the name of the testing religion. Because that is what it really is, its an unprovable belief system with a set of rituals that you absolutely must follow blindly, or else.
• regularfry 8y ago
  The problem with code review is that it works. That's why we can't shake the industry's fascination with it. It works to catch bugs, but it's horrendously inefficient in doing so. I ran some numbers on our code review process on a project last year. Of patches returned for modification, 5% contained a bug. 95% were for entirely stylistic changes. I find it hard to square that with being a good use of time. As an industry, we're making the mistake Deming points out in Out Of The Crisis: we're attempting to inspect defects out of existence rather than improve our production process so that they never get created in the first place. We concentrate our efforts on being better at 100% inspection, and don't allow ourselves to think that a process without that inspection could be a hell of a lot better, if we invested the effort in figuring out what that might look like. Pairing might be one answer here, although I don't think I've heard it talked about in those terms before.
  • Sharlin 8y ago
    Code review was never about catching bugs. Not primarily, anyway. Code is written for humans to read (and modify), and a reviewer's job is to make sure the code can adequately fulfill that purpose. A reviewer is a proxy for the person who has to touch the code in the future – indeed, often they're the same person! Lumping all code quality issues under "stylistic changes" is just a disingenuous false dichotomy.
    • regularfry 8y ago
      > Code review was never about catching bugs. Not primarily, anyway. That's incorrect. Code review originated as a technique specifically to find defects, under the name Fagan Inspection. That we've found peripheral benefits is great, but the central justification is defect reduction. > Code is written for humans to read (and modify), and a reviewer's job is to make sure the code can adequately fulfill that purpose. I quite like that formulation, but it doesn't undercut the point that we only seem to be able to cope by having a second (third, fourth) pair of eyeballs inspecting every single line of code after it's been written, rather than working on systems to get it right first time. > false dichotomy It's not, though. There is a real difference. If you find a defect in the code, you've definitely prevented a bug from reaching production today. If you find a style problem in the code, you've maybe prevented next month's work from slowing down. If the project stopped tomorrow, none of the style issues would matter, and the code would continue working just fine.
• DubiousPusher 8y ago
  Some simple tips I use to make this better. 1) Anything cosmetic gets a "nit" added to the comment. 2) When a review looks like mostly assets or boiler plate, I look through quickly for anything glaring and approve while noting my assumptions that the author has run the build and verified the additions. 3) If I'm in a hurry and the author is available I grab them and do an over the shoulder review. You might be surprised how much time this saves. 4) Don't struggle with difficult sections of other people's code unless you have a vested interest in remembering this specific section of code. Ask about unclear areas. 5) Trust your CI process. Don't try to consider every edge case for your reviewee. 6) Develop a culture of small work units. Encourage people to integrate every day or two. This means reviews are small and easier to grok. Code reviews are not a guarantee of correctness. They are another tool. We should find a good trade off between effectiveness and cost to get the most value out of them not strive for perfection.
  • neathack 8y ago
    These are all good tips, but I want to stress the importance of (6). Much of what the original post is talking about can be improved by adopting the habit of making small, incremental changes. As the author, you no longer have to wait "in the order of weeks" for the feedback and a potential rebase should pose little risk. As the reviewer, you don't have as much mental burden and most reviews can be done "in-between" bigger tasks, e.g. in the 15 minutes before a meeting or before lunch, etc. As for 1) I highly recommend to automate that away as much as possible. A strict syntax guideline and a toolchain that enforces it will go a long way.
    • danmaz74 8y ago
      Conceptually, I completely agree with (6). Practically, though, I found it really hard to do in some situations. Specifically, when doing something where the solution is well known for the beginning, creating PRs which are small and easy to understand is easy. When instead I have to solve difficult problems for which I don't already know the solution beforehand, and which require writing quite a bit of complex code - eg multiple classes that work with each other, and which maybe work with some complex external system I/the team doesn't already know well - I find it difficult to split the PR into smaller chunks, because I "evolve" the separate classes together, while also doing exploratory testing. "Production ready" code comes later in the process, and at that point I usually have quite a bit of code. I noticed that people don't like reviewing the non-production-ready code, but what's the alternative? In theory, after I found out what the solution is, I could go back and rewrite it better from the beginning, but that would just require too much time. Didn't find a good answer yet.
• terapixel 8y ago
  Of the choices that he proposes, #2 seems like the obvious solution to me - but he writes it off as too difficult. Phabricator’s stacked diffs [0] works wonderfully well to support this exact workflow (it isn’t clear from the post which versioning system the author uses and what workflows it supports - maybe I missed it?) [0] https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/ https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
  • jakecraige 8y ago
    Thanks for the link! I went down a small rabbit hole from this which ended up with a script that allows for similar style workflows even within the GitHub PR world: https://twitter.com/jakecraige/status/1056835104440545280 https://twitter.com/jakecraige/status/1056835104440545280 https://gist.github.com/jakecraige/51f9583f1f55cc0ecccfaa11e7a7c6b1 https://gist.github.com/jakecraige/51f9583f1f55cc0ecccfaa11e...
• ckastner 8y ago
  QA incurs a cost. It's perfectly natural to dislike this cost, but that's also largely irrelevant: the question (in each specific case) is whether the benefits are worth the cost, or not.
• DrBazza 8y ago
  "There's no such thing as a bad book" - you can and should treat it as a learning experience and take away one positive thing. "I wouldn't do that", "If I see that again, I'd do it this way", etc.
• _shadi 8y ago
  In one of the teams I worked in we had a policy to mitigate some of the things we found inefficient in our code reviews: 1- anything done in a pair doesn't need a code review. 2- any story that is more than 3 story points should be worked on in pair. 3- if you are doing a code review and you find something that needs to change you don't leave a comment, you update the branch and ask the original branch owner to review your new commit.
  • arwhatever 8y ago
    #3 sounds like a really good idea to get the reviewer to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak. Conversely,I could see that requirement causing particularly poorly-skilled developers tying up a disproportionate amount of the more skilled developers' time
    • _shadi 8y ago
      I see your point but we found out that this way the review will be done quicker rather than having discussions on the PR, since before adopting this policy the comments usually had pseudocode in them. anyway duo to #1 and #2 what actually ends up needing a review is the only minor or medium scope changes, and most of the time the commit will be renaming a variable/method or adding a test case. of course if you see the PR went in the wrong direction you can still reject it.
• ankit219 8y ago
  I think the author is talking about a 'Forced Code review' because it is supposedly a good practice to have a code review before you put something into production (which it is). The current practice is a coder submitting the entire code for review, and getting comments on every aspect that the reviewer feels like. This is not an efficient process as it takes up a lot of time, but reviewer also put in a position as to 'How would he solve the problem the current code has already solved' I feel a good code review process should have two components: 1/ Self-review. A team/company should agree on baselines/conventions that any code shipped by them should have, and ensure that any code not corresponding to that will be rejected. This review should be done by developer himself, rather than a reviewer. 2/ A code review by an experienced dev who needs to check for libraries/custom functions that are used might not break something somewhere else, or wont work because some other change is going somewhere else, that they know of. This way, potentially buggy code can be avoided, and process could be faster as well. Ofcourse, if they want to provide feedback on a better algo, they can, but should be optional
• weeksie 8y ago
  Pull request reviews are for merges into production, (or staging depending on your QA process) but you should always have a develop branch you can thrash on in the case that you are pushing a feature that is being worked on by another team (e.g. front/back end) Fix the workflow. Reviews are the best quality control measure out there, perhaps even better than unit tests.
• sid- 8y ago
  Coding is like sex ? Nobody wants to admit publicly that they suck at it
  • malmsteen 8y ago
    Haha
• ereyes01 8y ago
  "Good cooking takes time. If you are made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to please you." ^^ From the Menu of Restaurant Antoine, New Orleans, quoted in the beginning of The Mythical Man Month. Good engineering takes time and deliberate effort. Invariably, it will sometimes be tedious, but it is for the benefit of the product. IMO that includes code reviews, and/or pair programming. In my experience, the biggest source of friction is in comments over style and reviewers/reviewees that have an obstinate and opinionated stance on the matter. In my current project, we resolved this by simply requiring everything passes a linter (gofmt and ESLint in our case). Follow the linter, learn to like it, end of discussion. There's still structural / design style to fight over in reviews, but those are healthy fights IMO.
• austincheney 8y ago
  When the right processes are in place I am huge believer that most of the concerns raised from code reviews can be fully automated. I usually find people suck up code review time with code style or concerns of conformance to team standards. This is really basic stuff that sucks the life out of people and isn't productive. For me the residual benefit of code reviews is to invite people to examine how the code works so that it can be improved or simplified. By improve I mean objective concerns like execution performance, reduction of instruction size, security concerns, and so forth. I expect a very critical analysis. Don't be afraid to hurt my feelings because this code is about to go to production. Unfortunately, often times the proper automation controls are either not in place or the developers are fragile timid souls, particularly in group settings. Code reviews can be wonderfully constructive, but many times aren't.
• jatins 8y ago
  My only advice to reviewers is: If you say "do X", also explain the "Why?" behind it. Other than my only advice, these points are also helpful: - Zero Code Style, Formatting Comments should be allowed on reviews. If it passes the linter, it's good. - Re-naming classes/variables comments should be kept to minimum. Unless someone is using obviously bad names like `a`, it's probably a fine name.
• tekkk 8y ago
  Only time i've come to hate code review was when my counterpart (reviewer or the author) has been overly pedantic with no hint of any empathy in hir writing. I do not know was it because of inherent insecurity or no previous experience writing in more friendly manner but boy oh boy i was boiling inside arguing about useless things. The socially awkward seem to be in high numbers amongst programmers which makes these kind of ordeals a bit of agony at times.
  • LandR 8y ago
    I don't get this. A code review is a purely technical process. If he says your code is bad / wrong etc then that is a purely technical discussion that has to be had if you feel they are wrong. Why are you looking for empathy in code reviews? Why are you getting feelings involved at all?
    • tekkk 8y ago
      This might had been a cultural thing between me and the other party. I don't mind being very to the point and strict about programming but when it comes off as condescending and "I know better than you" it's just something I can't stand. Or maybe a better example, they make pesky remarks on your programming style while ignoring all your writing about theirs. I think because the other person here was a bit older than me, not a senior dev but still old enough apparently, that he felt he had to prove something to the younger guy. But yeah I'm going off the rails here. My point is that relationships are hard and even in seemingly neutral setting, a code review, tensions can arise. I do not know what to say on those occasions but getting snarkier and snarkier in comments is definitely not the way to go. Bad code reviews have been one of the most infuriating things I've come across my developer career.
      • distances 8y ago
        As you already said, this sounds like a people issue. Snark, sarcasm or belittling has no place whatsoever in a code review (or at a work setting in general, obviously). Sounds like you just got a bad colleague.
• rasteau 8y ago
  I think the author and many folks here have an unhelpful understanding of code reviews. I suggest code reviews' primary purpose should not be to catch bugs or trivial style issues; automated tests and linters exist for those purposes. Instead, code reviews should be primarily thought of as "human comprehensibility tests". When we write code, we've may have spent a significant amount of time thinking about the problem. This puts us in a bad position to gauge how readily someone in the future can reason about our code in order to fix or modify it safely and easily. Code reviews are a mechanism for showing empathy to our future selves, which accumulates over time into a much more pleasant coding environment. Relatedly, comments on a PR are ephemeral. A rule of thumb I use: if a reviewer asks a reasonable question -- something someone in the future might wonder about when I'm no longer around, I answer it by first improving the code.
• jillesvangurp 8y ago
  I get the sentiment. I'm currently in a small startup and not doing any code reviews as such. That's probably not ideal because I know I make mistakes. Last year I was on a big project in a senior role and doing and receiving lots of code reviews. There's a whole etiquette around these things that you have to appreciate. First off, I got lots of feedback that was valuable. My view with code reviews is that they should be timely and appropriate in scope. Reviewers should have some time to review but not forever. I tend to do them early in the morning or before I leave but I'm not likely to interrupt my workflow for them; unless I'm asked to do so. Real time is not a reasonable expectation. But days delay is also not reasonable. The smaller the pull request, the less time is acceptable. The bigger the change, the longer you allow for reviews. Also, the bigger the PR, the higher the workload for reviewers. Keep your PRs small and create lots of them instead of dumping lots of big changes in one PR. It also helps to classify review comments as blocking or not blocking. A valid outcome can be to file a follow up ticket for another change. Yes, it would be nice to refactor this bit of code but given that it was a two line code change that got the job done, maybe right now that is good enough. My view is that if CI tests pass and the code is better than before it was changed in some meaningful way, it should always be OK to merge. Finally, sometimes there's an asymmetric relation with the reviewer and reviewee in terms of seniority. You can use this as a didactic tool to educate juniors. But it is also an opportunity to point out they did well; which I'd argue is just as important. Likewise, you have to place comments from juniors in context as well. They might feel a little intimidated commenting on your code and if they mean well, it's important to give them feedback on their comments. IMHO it is important that people speak up and feel safe to do so. A simple "You are right, I will fix this. Thanks for pointing that out." makes them feel good.
• quickthrower2 8y ago
  The real problem with code reviews is when the reviewer isn't good. If they pick on trivia or make you redesign unnecessarily or are unpleasant or too busy its a problem.
• adwmayer 8y ago
  Parts of this are in other comments, but I find a couple things help code reviews enormously to be more efficient. 1) Automatic code formatters/linters before the code gets to review. When everybody knows there's a formatter, reviewers can spend less time looking for formatting issues. Generally, people are more inclined to take a quick look at the code then too, because they know their focusing on "just" the logic, which helps with getting a review sooner. 2) Smaller sets of changes up for review. Yes, this might mean more code reviews overall and more process, but it's way easier to catch a bug in a < 100 line change than in a 1000+ line change. This also means keeping the contents of the review as focused as possible. If you want to refactor some major chunk of code because it makes the actual thing you're trying to do easier, go for it, but do it in a first code review and separate the logical changes. This goes to both reviews being more straightforward for the reviewer to get through and them wanting to do it in the first place. I'm way more likely to avoid a massive 30 changed files code review than a quick 5 line change, because I need way less focus to review the latter. 3) (this one might be controversial) Early code reviews where appropriate. If you're making a change that's more likely to be totally rejected, get it into code review as soon as the basic structure and logic is in place and ask somebody to review it as quickly as possible. This is before tests are ready and every todo is completed or whatever else. The review should be quick and dirty, but at least that way you know if you should be proceeding with your current path at all or change course. Again, this means more time spent reviewing, but it's a lot better than getting a review after a week saying what you just wrote has already been done, or it totally misses goal, or it has some critical issue, or whatever. This helps a lot with what to do while you're waiting for feedback too. If you've got this type of code review up then you can keep working on the details while you're waiting on feedback. If your code review doesn't fall into this category, you're probably relatively safe to start working on the next thing, because at most you'll need to make some small changes to what you're working on, not throw it out altogether. 4) Making sure code review is considered a priority on the team. That includes the team lead prioritizing code reviews and encouraging others to prioritize code reviews. If the code doesn't get reviewed, it doesn't get shipped, so it's ultimately more important than writing new code.
• jezze 8y ago
  I think the problem is more about workflow than code review per se. I have previously complained about the exact same things as this article. If you factor in your CI pipeline as well it could be hours from writing a patch until its merged and during that time you are in practice blocked from continuing to build stuff on top of your previous commit. Because of this high friction you wont bother to rename that variable or fix that whitespace because its not worth the time. Instead I thought it would help to make code reviews optional. It is dangerous and I wouldnt recommend it for everyone and it only works if you have a CI pipeline in place of good quality. What you do is that you allow people to push directly to master, then you have your CI system continously testing all the latest commits and only if something breaks will it report it back and then the person who wrote that commit needs to fix it. I have never tried this in a real working environment but I think it would decrease friction a lot and just be slightly worse in quality. Also instead of pushing to master you could have a staging area that automatically pushes to master if it passed the tests. That might even be better actually.
• jasim 8y ago
  I echo most of these sentiments, but it might be possible to solve it once and for all with an approach similar to Jane Street's Iron. https://blog.janestreet.com/ironing-out-your-development-style/ https://blog.janestreet.com/ironing-out-your-development-sty...
• aalleavitch 8y ago
  On the one hand I get where you’re coming from, on the other hand I definitely broke our submit tracking by randomly inserting a space into a string in a commit I made months ago and my coworker just noticed it last week. Sometimes it’s nice just to have another pair of eyes glance over your diff to pick out obvious mistakes.
• stefs 8y ago
  i agree with the author in that i personally don't like code reviews much as well, though i agree they are valuable. to be more specific though, i don't like "remote" or "detached" code reviews much; "over the shoulder" code reviews are a completely different thing. as you can actively communicate with the author or the reviewer, it tends to reduce the bike shedding a lot and the value of positive feedback increases. i guess, ultimately, it depends on the team; if you're operating well together, classic code reviews might work as well. if the team is new or the members have varying styles or levels of exerience, over-the-shoulder reviews tend to pay off significantly.
• golergka 8y ago
  How about a novel concept: there will always be some parts of your job that you don't enjoy. Tedious things, boring things, annoying things. All the different check lists, beurocracy, reports, task tracking - there are a lot of annoying little stuff that we sometimes have to do. Some of those things can be optimized or automated away. But some of those things can't: turns out, although they're completely irrelevant 98% of the time, they're completely critical in the remaning 2%, and nobody knows what those 2% are, so we're stuck with these practices.
• messit 8y ago
  I've worked in teams bad enough to make code reviews a real pain. I've seen pretty horrible code constructs that actually seemed to work without bugs. What should I say? That the author of that piece of code should completely rewrite it to my taste? It would not only frustrate him/her but also slow down the entire team. So I often accept what is rubbish IMAO. And not me alone, have you ever seen two code-buddies in a team always doing each others code review and(quickly) accepting and merging everything they produce before anyone can make a comment? I've had numerous pointless discussions about why I wrote a specific piece of code where (a junior dev) the assessor just wanted me to do things by the book as he learned it, not really understanding why I did it that way. But there was no way to convince him, it ended up in an unresolved conflict that I only could solve by messing up my code to his taste. All these pointless discussions that particularly affect the relationship you have with your co-developers in the team you work in, are not always fruitful and can be quite destructive if you're not careful enough. I do believe code reviews can be very important and valuable, but at the same time I've seen huge amounts of wasted time and frustration for nothing. It's not always and only a good thing is my conclusion, it depends on the variables.
  • therein 8y ago
    > I've had numerous pointless discussions about why I wrote a specific piece of code where (a junior dev) the assessor just wanted me to do things by the book as he learned it, not really understanding why I did it that way. But there was no way to convince him, it ended up in an unresolved conflict that I only could solve by messing up my code to his taste. I've left the place I worked at for over 3.5 years over stuff like this adding up. Starting at my new job in a few weeks, getting paid more than I did at my previous job and will be working with people more senior than in my previous team. All in exchange of the rapport I've built over 3.5 years.
• lmm 8y ago
  > If I spend a day doing nothing but reading code reviews, I'll end up feeling unsatisfied and unproductive. Because code review feels fundamentally optional -- even though I believe it's beneficial, it's something we've chosen to do, not something that we absolutely have to do in order for the project or business to keep operating -- it's more frustrating to find myself spending a large amount of time on. This is where you need to change your mindset from writing code to delivering business value. At my first job we realized that tickets were actually spending longer in code review than in development - and therefore our primary bottleneck on delivering functionality was code review. So as a developer code review is actually your main job, and writing code is something you do in your downtime when you don't have any reviews available. Once everyone in the team is making reviewing code their top priority (or at least, a higher priority than writing their own code), waiting for review becomes much less of a problem.
  • PopeDotNinja 8y ago
    I'll add that code reviews are vulnerable to garbage in, garbage out. Code reviews the are magically 100% efficient at catching will still be expensive in terms of time if all incoming code is garbage. By reducing upstream garbage, code reviews become less expensive, making more time available for anything else, including coding.
    • dennisgorelik 8y ago
      Fortunately, code reviews improve quality of incoming code: both original coder and code reviewer learn how to code better during code review.
• flurdy 8y ago
  "Pair with people you like, code review people you don't like" Me, some years ago. Not black and white, but less code review is needed if a task was paired on, if at all.
• carlsborg 8y ago
  The core message is not "Code reviews are a bad thing" but "Blocked on code review is expensive" and I agree that aspect can be an issue: it can be a badly timed context switch for the reviewer, and we know context switches are expensive in terms of productivity, so in some cases it makes good sense to defer it to a later point in time. And this is valuable time lost for the author. So whats a better approach?
  • Telichkin 8y ago
    Have you tried a pair programming? I realized that this practice much more effective than code review. Pair programming encourages learning inside a team, interactions and code quality. It also reduces time to market.
• miqkt 8y ago
  I view code reviews as a good opportunity for learning but I've one particular grievance with them. Specifically, when I'm asked to code review a pull request that's alarmingly huge (i.e. touches more than a dozen files, +1000 LOC changes, etc). I've never come up with a bullet-proof way to deal with this. The situation usually ends up with me providing a rubber stamp of approval and making some caveat commentary about "uncertainties" due to my inability to devote so much time to be rigorous. I feel bad every time I've got to do this. The problem might be exacerbated at another level too. For features, stories might not be broken down enough.
  • distances 8y ago
    At one project there was a rule for large PRs: if the change exceeds a thousand lines, you have to bring review cookies. Keeps you mindful of the PR size and the rest of the team won't grumble that much.
• dotdi 8y ago
  I used to hate code-reviews but now I'm a convert after: (1) we brought in better people. It's fun to sit with competent people and trash-talk some code, and (2) after I pushed the team to use better tooling, which in our case is GitLab + Merge Requests. You can imagine the dark ages before that.
  • btasovac 8y ago
    We're happy to hear that GitLab helped you improve your code-review experience! We documented some of the advice and best practices that might be useful when performing code review or having your code reviewed [0]. [0] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/code_review.html#best-practices https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/code_review.html#best...
• watwut 8y ago
  I hate code review too, mostly power plays it brings. I had reviewer forcing me to produce code I considered bad - but the prolonged discussion before deadline would mean more wasted time so I did not argued. I have seen code review block code for subjective differences in variables naming (e.g. no convention was broken and both names were fine). I have had code reviewer demanding change, after I implemented exactly demanding next change in his own code and after I complained he just shrugged and said "now I think this is better". I had seen people misuse code review to force standards that they just made up based on blog dude read yesterday - only to change opinion three weeks later. I had seen senior developer letting junior work alone for two weeks, only to iteratively force the junior to rewrite all of it to seniors liking. Ridiculous waste of time and cruel. So, with wrong politics and people it is hell.
  • watwut 8y ago
    The core problem is that code reviewing is leadership, supervisory/gatekeeper function as any other, kind of like editor and should be treated as such. Even if reviewer and coder are formally at same footing or switch functions, it is momentary it. So, treat it as such and expect people to treat it as such. Meanwhile, people in tech talk about it in idealistic terms that are sometimes true, but often not. 1.) Don't use code review to teach juniors, talk with juniors in advance and supervise them as they go. If they learn about major architectural problem in code review, you are senioring wrong. 2.) Don't try to tech colleges in code review or use code review to force new standards on ad-hoc basis. Talk about issues in standards before, teach colleges as you go around your day without holding pull requests (and their weekends in work) hostage. If your only communication about these issues is code review, you are doing it wrong. 3.) Don't assume that code reviewer is automatically right just by its function and don't let code reviewer to steal responsibility from coder. Don't assume opposite either (through assuming opposite is better). Don't make discussion a taboo. 4.) Difference in opinion is normal and does not mean one of the people in conflict is idiot. 5.) Passive aggression does not belong to code review. Don't lie in code review comments either. "This is objectively horribly wrong" counts as lie if you are using it to push for personal preference and not ready to defend it. If you say or imply in your code review comment that someone is lesser coder, it is ok for that person to challenge the assumption and defend himself. 6.) Keep your own emotions out if as much as possible. If the code is making you angry, is it objectively bad or just something you are personally unused to (new syntax can be annoying even if it is good)? Distinguish the two. Code review should be about one things only: Is this good enough to go to codebase? Is this required change a blocker or minor thing (variable naming)? All the other functions can be a bit helped by review, but absolutely should not be seen as review purpose.
• deleted 8y ago
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• caymanjim 8y ago
  I agree with everything in the article. My biggest problems with code review are: 1. The reviewer usually lacks the context to truly review the solution and all its implications, and instead gives only a cursory review focused on style and trivialities. Sometimes they're familiar enough with the code to give an insightful review, and there's benefit to commenting on even the small things, but I've seen countless major architectural problems pass review because the reviewer lacked the time and familiarity to notice them. This isn't helped by reviews typically being done on GitHub code diffs; you're seeing a couple out of context lines and it's hard to understand how it all fits together. 2. By the time code is ready for review, it's too late. Sure, you can stop the presses if you notice an egregious problem (not that anyone usually does; see #1). My team tries to keep its reviews small and frequent, but they still often contain one or more full days of effort. If the solution has major problems, catching them after the fact means a lot of wasted effort on rewrites. Often there's no time to fix it right, so someone hacks around the faults and ships a "good enough" product. The tech debt piles up quickly. As a result of both of these, code reviews are often little more than a rubber stamp. This isn't to say that I don't think code reviews have any merit. I think that code reviews on every single change are a waste of time. Periodic detailed reviews of architecture are valuable, and periodic team reviews of code can help spread good patterns. Many of these problems are obviated by pair programming. It's real-time code review before it's too late. It's the single biggest benefit to pairing, although there are plenty of others (like sharing knowledge and building team bonds). Pairs are also subject to the same pitfalls, but at a far lower rate than solo developers.
  • v_lisivka 8y ago
    1. You need to put context into comments. Code is written once but read multiple times, so you should optimize for later case. 2. "Too late" is when bug hits the client and affects income. If not, then it's not "too late", it's just "a bit late". 2-3% in effort increase to decrease number of bugs (increase customer satisfaction) by 15-20% is huge win. If you will not do that, your competitors will do that instead of you.
• boomlinde 8y ago
  I love reviewing code and I love having my code reviewed. In my current team we make significant improvements to the code during the review phase, both shaking off bugs and making architectural improvements. That said, I think that there are some prerequisites for productive code review. Changes are preferably small, reviews need to happen in a timely fashion, the surface area for style nitpicking needs to be minimized with linting and formatting tools and the team needs to be pretty accepting when it comes to different minor design decisions that the different team members might make. If your change is 2000 lines for what could have been several atomic changes and you get 50 comments about indentation, "you should do it this [slightly different way that the reviewer would have preferred that doesn't significantly improve legibility or design]" after prodding the other team members for a week, address the comments and wait yet another week (and also manually rebase the patch because of 10 conflicts) it's no fun.
• vfc1 8y ago
  Systematic code reviews is really a complete subversion of the agile spirit. Agile was about doing what makes the most sense for the project at any given time, and code reviews don't make sense all of the time, far from it. I worked on projects with systematic code reviews, and while the reviews hardly caught any issue, they did add significant delays and endless discussions with some very unreasonable people that would systematically question every single line of code for no good reason. I had to submit reviews and wait a day for them to be approved for things such as 3 lines of CSS changed. Code reviews should be left for occasions when the code actually needs some review: for example, the developer changed a part of the code that he/she is not familiar with and wants the code to be checked by someone who is experienced in that part of the system. Code reviews yes, but only when it really makes sense, and not by default. Some of the things I've seen regarding code reviews are just way too absurd and it just adds to the overall demotivation of the team to have to do something absurd every day just because its the rules. Most of the time, these procedures are put in place by non-technical managers who have usually not coded themselves a single line of code in their lives.
  • sethammons 8y ago
    While I agree with the spirit, I disagree in whole. "One line config change? I don't need a code review." At our org, even that needs a CR. It takes a few minutes generally to request it in our chat room. Usually, the other person sees no issue and you get their stamp that guards the build process. However! Multiple times (a small percentage), the person asks for a clarification on it and it turns out that a conflicting config needs updating or a comment is warranted or they remind you that this change will (maybe minorly) affect another team and asks if you reached out to let them know. Can it get in the way? Yes, it can. So as a team, learn how to streamline. For us, usually someone is available for a "quick cr." Larger ones take longer. Maybe some changes are too small, but for our team (no CSS), we've not found a consistent candidate.
• oldboyFX 8y ago
  Folks, keep in mind that the value of code reviews, tests, etc. varies wildly from project to project. - What kind of product are you building? - How large is the project? - How many developers are working on it? - How experienced are the developers? - How is the project being managed? - Are there any hard deadlines? - What is the budget? Burn-rate? Runway? - Is the product established or are you just building the MVP and trying to validate market demand? A two-person development team building an MVP with ever-changing requirements won't have the same workflow as an established company with a large development team and a bunch of existing users.
• topkai22 8y ago
  Code review aren’t meant to find defects- they are meant to prevent them. Every study I’ve seen on code or peer review effectiveness (and there are many) demonstrates that when code reviews are added into an orgs development process, product defects are reduced, and reduced by far more than what is accounted for in bugs directly filled in code reviews. Knowing that code is going to be reviewed and/or having to explain that code changes the way developers write code to begin with, for the better. I’m a bit of a code review evangelist, so I’m surprised at the amount of negativity toward code reviews. Some of it sounds a bit self centered, upset that it slows down “thier” productivity or ability to self express through code rather than the real purpose of the reviews- to improve the product and organization as a whole.
• dredmorbius 8y ago
  What this calls for is fixing / streamlining process, and awareness of context-shift costs of path-dependent processing. The "have multiple projects, or alternatively, 'scuttwork' model, likely makes most sense. A list of noncritical-but-evergreen tasks that don't require heavy cognitive load is useful. Shoring up docs, drilling on procedures, interviewing, studying new skills or tools, etc. (Retail has a similar concept for sales associates durring slack time.) Another is to tighten or parallelise, and prioritise and reward the review process. Both familiarity and unfamiliarity with the code base can be useful -- quick assimilation, and fresh eyes / expanded institutional awarenesss and knowledge (plus increased Bus Number).
• let_var 8y ago
  Code reviews have been both a useful medium to share new learnings among team members that actually makes the code elegant or perform better, and an endless threads about conventions and nitpicking. I think it makes sense to set premise or template for a good peer reviewing exercise. New team members should be educated about these guidelines.
• ken 8y ago
  In other jobs, I accept that I'm occasionally going to be waiting. The goal is to produce value at the organization level, and that just isn't compatible with each individual operating at 100% efficiency at all times. It's egotistical of programmers to think that they should. It's unfair of managers to expect this of them. Amdahl's Law applies to humans, too. The issue is procedural. If you hate that code review of an API implementation might require changing the interface, then you should do a review of the API design before you implement it. That should be the case with every phase. Any time you have to perform multiple steps and worry that review of a later step might cause an earlier step to be invalidated, that simply means you're reviewing too late, at too coarse a level. Or not. Adding more reviews keeps the big-O factor down, but increases the constant factor. As an organization, you can pick if you want individual contributors to never have to backtrack, or if you want them to be able to use speculative execution. One way is more predictable, and the other way can be faster if you're good at guessing right.
• jlundborg 8y ago
  In my team, we have started using these rules to address the code review lag-time: * While you are waiting for code review, review someone else's code * Aim for reviewing two CR:s per CR you submit. This has helped us both keep on top of the CR queue and to have something that is not too distracting to do while waiting for review.