Human Considerations in Mandatory Formal Code Reviews - Part 2 *

Most mandatory formal code reviews are ineffective, costly, and often create disharmony within the team.

Continue from Part 1, the human factors to consider for the mandatory formal code review process:

• 4. Software Engineers: Would you like to pause your current work to review a colleague’s PR?

• 5. Do you really think software developers can effectively spot the majority of real issues just by eyeballing the code changes in a PR?

• 6. Do software developers want to carry the extra responsibility for someone’s code?

• 7. Software engineers are evaluated based on the quality and functionality of their code, not the number of PRs they review.

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4. “Software Engineers: Would you like to pause your current work to review a colleague’s PR?”

For most software engineers, the answer to the question above—regardless of whether others think they should or shouldn’t—is ‘NO.’