[bstpierre]

Maybe it happens a lot and nobody has mentioned it here yet, but I find live, out-of-band reviews are often very effective. By this I mean looking at a patch and asking questions or raising issues with the author. I do this fairly regularly for PRs at work where the “live” aspect is just slack (I work remotely).

A dozen or so years ago I worked at a startup using svn and all reviews were like this: generate a diff, post a link to the diff on jabber, someone will comment/question. There’s room for immediate back and forth as needed. Revise, approve, done. Very lightweight, yet effective. However we were all colocated and all of the team members were high functioning so I’m not sure if it generalizes. (Also, being colocated meant that occasionally the jabber conversation could move to f2f with whiteboards if things got complicated.)