I know of a few places where people say that code reviews are the reason they have such great code quality (I've even worked at one of those places), but AFAIK they all ship a lot more bugs while moving slower.
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I've wondered about this. Anecdotally, the place I've worked with the best quality didn't do code review (maybe three "serious" user-visible bugs during the 8 years I was there, one of which was a fab issue that couldn't have been caught with any amount of code review).https://twitter.com/skamille/status/1169765800829435904 …
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I believe code reviews, done well, are primarily about training and team building, not reducing bugs.
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That said, it is still worth questioning their cost/benefit! The modern code review consensus has been promoted by tech companies with enough revenue to hide any costs. The problem is what I think of as the value of code reviews is hard to measure.
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@skamille Microsoft research did an extensive study of code reviews at Microsoft ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/characteristics-of-useful-code-reviews-an-empirical-study-at-microsoft/ … ) and their conclusions were strongly in favor of code reviews. I don't remember if they measured the waiting for approval time.Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Also anecdotal, but my experience is that the chief benefit of code review is not code quality but shared knowledge. If you use XP pairs or have other ways to ensure democratization of code knowledge, then I’m unsure of value of code reviews.
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Code reviews aren't designed to prevent defects. They're designed to maximize the chance of finding defects that already exist before they hit production. Most bugs are inserted at the design phase, so I ask you: what was your design phase like?
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Most companies don't have a design phase anymore thanks to a misinterpretation of Agile. If you don't do any design, then yes, you need code reviews. It's a high cost to pay for not doing any up front design, imho, but it's the tradeoff companies are making today.
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Not sure there's a correlation, other than that a place that has very strong devs who produce very high quality code, could do without reviews.
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Did that place have many programmers inexperienced in the domain, languages you were using, or programming generally? For me code review was/is a big part of my growth
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