Code reviews aren’t just for catching bugs
What often goes unmentioned in praise for code review processes is their insanely exorbitant costs -- measured in engineer hours but perhaps more costly is all of the blocking and impedance [1]. Most of the &quot;problems&quot; that code reviews claim to address can be solved by much more direct and optimal measures. Code reviews are damn expensive.<p>This post concedes that code reviews are better for the more fluffy ends -- teamwork, openness, social recognition, but given their high costs, I&#x27;d rather achieve even these soft goals in other ways than to impede my team&#x27;s delivery potential.<p>While mission critical systems deserve the whole kitchen sink thrown at them, expensive verifications, code reviews, etc etc., most business applications would do much better optimizing for better software architectures and domain conceptualization than spend so much time dwelling on the minutiae of lines of code.<p>[1] Continuous integration and refactoring, pillars of agility, go out the window in typical code review environments where commits are blocked until peer review.