[flagged]
The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain
71–80 of 193 posts
Re: The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain
#72This just makes reviewers and authors lazier. The purpose of code review is multi-faceted. Hard to maintain? Yes. Might have bugs? Yes. Can be done simpler/cleaner? Yes. Is in line with project code style? Yes. Get someone else to also understand the code? Yes. Onboard junior team member? Yes. Sanity check design decisions? Yes. This flippant note is mostly more self-justification for being a lazy code reviewer.
Indeed, we worked hard as an industry to move beyond "blame the author" to "blame the process/team".
Unfortunately this article is just bait, may as well say "People seem to think dinner is about eating food, but it's not about eating at all, actually it's about connecting with family and friends!". It's a specific type of poorly constructed reductionist argument that plays well on HN.
Re: The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain
#73The author is a mathematician, so when he says “it is not in general possible to find bugs by examining the code” he does not mean it is completely impossible to find bugs. He means only that it is not possible to find all bugs or even any particular bug.
User names match... are you the original author? Why commenting in the third person?
Because it was him... 10 months ago?
Re: The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain
#74It's also important to help other members of the team to learn and understand.
Re: The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain
#75No, the real reason for the code review is to protect the moat of senior engineers/leaders that would nitpick on minute details of code while ignoring the big picture to make sure they can gatekeep any promotions and their competition.
If that's how it functions where you work, I'd be looking for a new job.
Re: The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain
#76Code review isn’t a singular thing. There are many reasons for code review, like knowledge sharing, liability laundering, code quality, regulatory compliance, etc. As usual, what purpose it serves depend on your use case.
Re: The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain
#77What I find to be maybe the single most important part of code review is knowledge transfer. Our entire small team thumbs up a PR before it's merged unless there's a big rush on it, and this gives everyone on the team a rough idea of the state of the codebase at any given time. There's no being blindsided like "this whole system I depend on is gone" like I had happen at far more siloed places I've worked. Beyond that…
Complexity is caused by Dependencies and Obscurities ~ John Ousterhout
Looks like you had both.
Re: The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain
#78The author is a mathematician, so when he says “it is not in general possible to find bugs by examining the code” he does not mean it is completely impossible to find bugs. He means only that it is not possible to find all bugs or even any particular bug.
[deleted]
Re: The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain
#79What I find to be maybe the single most important part of code review is knowledge transfer. Our entire small team thumbs up a PR before it's merged unless there's a big rush on it, and this gives everyone on the team a rough idea of the state of the codebase at any given time. There's no being blindsided like "this whole system I depend on is gone" like I had happen at far more siloed places I've worked. Beyond that…
We even find ourselves creating PRs in situations where the code is going to be merged immediately anyway, and tagging other devs, just so they have a convenient way to see what got merged and why. So people don't lose track of what is in the codebase.
this is a great way to train people to ignore PR emails/notifications
Re: The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain
#80What I find to be maybe the single most important part of code review is knowledge transfer. Our entire small team thumbs up a PR before it's merged unless there's a big rush on it, and this gives everyone on the team a rough idea of the state of the codebase at any given time. There's no being blindsided like "this whole system I depend on is gone" like I had happen at far more siloed places I've worked. Beyond that…
> Our entire small team thumbs up a PR before it's merged unless there's a big rush on it, and this gives everyone on the team a rough idea of the state of the codebase at any given time. There's no being blindsided like "this whole system I depend on is gone" like I had happen at far more siloed places I've worked.
How large is your team? Because I don't think that would scale beyond maybe five engineers
I'm a huge proponent of automated testing, because that catches things like "this whole system I depend on is gone" even if the guy who depends on it isn't in the room
I'm also a huge proponent of shared ownership of ... everything, really. It's natural for people to kind of own different pieces of a codebase, especially if it's a component they created, but that leads to silos and low bus counts. There shouldn't be one guy who owns one system that depends on one other component