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jonobird1 | 1 year ago

I'm not sure code reviews hold much merit. I've been a web developer for around 12 years and I've worked in companies big and small.

I think there should be a manual QA process to test the functionality of what the developer is pushing out.

The issue with code reviews is always that they take so much time for another developer and many devs are super busy so they just have a quick review of the PR and approve or feel they have to add some comments. Context switching between what the dev is already doing and having to come to the PR to review properly means they should switch to that Git branch, pull down the code, test it all and check for logical bugs that a static code review won't pick up.

For juniors, code reviews are still useful as you will be able to spot poor quality code, but for seniors, not as much for the reasons above, better off having a QA process to find and logic holes rather than expecting devs to invest so much time in context switching.

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hakunin|1 year ago

The problem here is not that developers are too busy, but that code reviews are considered second class citizens to churning out new code. It's like saying "many devs are super busy working on feature A so they just write quick and dirty code for feature B". If reviews are integral part of feature production pipeline, there should be no issue to sit down and spend a day reviewing code. For bigger, more complex things it could be a few rounds of reviews.

There is an approximate non linear relationship between time it takes to produce the first PR and time it takes to go through all rounds of review. This time can be pretty reliably calculated and taken into account.

skywhopper|1 year ago

Nah, automated testing cover basic functionality. For most PRs, a senior familiar with the code wouldn’t need to check it out and manually test anything, that’s not what “code review” is most of the time. If you need them to look at the code in a running state, that should be part of the CI process, not a manual task for the developer.

A good reviewer can call out bad strategic coding decisions or misinterpretations of the requirements. QA is another layer of review entirely.

kqr|1 year ago

I'm a little surprised to hear this. Would you mind sending an email to hn@xkqr.org so that I can ask some follow-up questions, please?