this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Your thoughts on Code Reviews (infosec.pub)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by mattreb@feddit.it to c/programming@programming.dev
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Hey, I want your opinion on code reviews, what is the best way to use them in a professional environment? Pick one of the following and give me your thoughts (from the most forgiving to the most strict):

  1. no code reviews, they are useless
  2. optional code reviews
  3. mandatory reviews on code that is already merged, optional fixes
  4. mandatory reviews on code before merging (like a pull request), with a time-frame for optional fixes (i.e. whether to fix what has been pointed out is up to the author), merge will occur anyway.
  5. mandatory reviews on code before merging (PR) with mandatory fixes.

Of course in open source development with public contributions, you'll often see (5), but I'm not convinced it could work in professional dev.

Edit: I'm talking about a team of 5 mid to senior devs (no junior or interns) working on a 2-3 year project without many security concerns, but feel free to give me your general opinion.

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[–] mattreb@feddit.it 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

when you were asked to "just merge" why was the review still on going? too large, or you didn't find an agreement with the autor?

[–] gsv@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It was more a question of finding the time within the daily business of doing science. I suppose it is also a culture issue, the priority to do a review is usually low. In other words, there was de facto never a review.

[–] mattreb@feddit.it 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thanks, that's actually interesting. I've found making #5 work with limited human resources / deadlines challenging, and wondered what to do. My answer in the past has been to lower review quality (reviewing faster) while keeping #5.

In my case the priority for reviews was high, but we were limited by the reviewers/developers ratio since most people would not do reviews...

[–] gsv@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

I'm glad to hear that lack of time/resources for code reviews are more common. Also for clarification: I was the author and requested reviews by my colleagues. In reverse, I did not receive requests to review PRs so far. Tbh. I would really like such a review culture as it is already standard in scientific publishing and it would have avoided some obvious bugs we did encounter in the past. Having that said, as I did not receive any review at all and I would appreciate low(er) quality reviews better than none.