3 ms·
At 30 years of coding professionally in great engineering-focused organizations, and that on top of nearly a lifetime of having coded for myself, I’ve concluded
by foobiekr 3y ago
At 30 years of coding professionally in great engineering-focused organizations, and that on top of nearly a lifetime of having coded for myself, I’ve concluded code reviews barely work.
I agree with everything you say here, but honestly it’s quite ineffective. I wish we had found something better than unit tests (often misleading and fragile) and the ability of a qualified reviewer to maintain attention and context that a real review entails.
- vvanders 3y agoIMO catching bugs is a nice side-effect of code reviews. The primary value I've seen across teams has been more on having shared team context across a codebase, if something goes bump in the night you've got a sense on how that part of the codebase works. It's also a great opportunity for other engineers to ask "why" and explain parts that aren't obvious or other context that's relevant. We'll find the occasional architectural mismatch(although we like to catch those much earlier in the design process) and certainly prevented bugs from shipping but if that's the primary focus I think a team is missing a lot of the value from regular code reviews.
- foobiekr 3y agoYes, I don’t disagree, I just think in practice they do the job very poorly. I’ve tried many things over the years trying to make this work but honestly have found nothing that works at the high end. At the low end of engineering, yeah, code reviews matter a ton and do catch bugs even if they’re basically just peephole inspections.