What are these &quot;more direct and optimal measures&quot; that are cheaper than code reviews?<p>In my experience code reviews are much cheaper than other means of raising software quality. For example unit tests only start to add real value after you have written a good bunch of them, so they form this regression-safety-net.<p>I haven&#x27;t seen Continuous integration and refactoring being thrown out of the window because of code reviews. Quite the opposite. Code reviews usually ask the author to refactor his code further. Similarly I have no idea why one would stop continuous integration because of code reviews.