I am an experienced principal software engineer and team lead in a software house. Code reviews are essential part of our development process. Having said that we avoid lengthy reviews. We don't have review meetings, forms, sign off procedures, the stuff that put people off. Code reviews are a conducted entirely online via Jira forms, using a simple set of workflow rules. It is a non-intrusive, friendly process. I am considered to be one of the best coders, but I am not flawless. I find it hugely valuable for someone (at least as experienced as myself) to review my code. Even if I have the chance to slip it, I won't. It is for my own benefit. Most ideas are subjective and they pop up in human consciousness. I am not talking about detecting simple errors, but issues more of structural, the ways you structure code; i.e. efficiency vs maintainability, or generality vs usability. I don't believe there is a machine process out there that can successfully replace a human reviewer to find the optimum between these extremes, at least not for another 100 years. To sum up, "don't give up code reviews, but simplify them, make them developer friendly".
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I am an experienced principal software engineer and team lead in a software house. Code reviews are essential part of our development process. Having said that we avoid lengthy reviews. We don't have review meetings, forms, sign off procedures, the stuff that put people off. Code reviews are a conducted entirely online via Jira forms, using a simple set of workflow rules. It is a non-intrusive, friendly process. I am considered to be one of the best coders, but I am not flawless. I find it hugely valuable for someone (at least as experienced as myself) to review my code. Even if I have the chance to slip it, I won't. It is for my own benefit. Most ideas are subjective and they pop up in human consciousness. I am not talking about detecting simple errors, but issues more of structural, the ways you structure code; i.e. efficiency vs maintainability, or generality vs usability. I don't believe there is a machine process out there that can successfully replace a human reviewer to find the optimum between these extremes, at least not for another 100 years. To sum up, "don't give up code reviews, but simplify them, make them developer friendly".