Absolutely - I don't see code reviews as a replacement for mentoring, more as something to augment it, or direct future mentoring sessions. I've had quite a fe

Absolutely - I don't see code reviews as a replacement for mentoring, more as something to augment it, or direct future mentoring sessions. I've had quite a few experiences where I've suggested a change in a code review, and found out that the author lacked knowledge in that area. That's then turned into a future topic to focus on in future mentoring sessions. Agree about design too, I don't think code review is really the place for that, since it's often a bit late by then (plus it's hard to get a sense of the overall intent and architecture from code chagnes alone). It's a shame it doesn't happen formally more often, but one place I worked in the past always had a separate design review (which needed at least one person to approve) before coding could even start. This was fairly informal, but caught a few major potential design problems early on.