Many people misunderstand the purpose of code review
The author argues that many people misunderstand code review, viewing it as a gatekeeping or fault-finding process rather than a collaborative tool for knowledge sharing, improving code quality, and building team understanding.
Background
- Code review is a practice in software development where someone other than the author reads through proposed code changes before they are merged into the main project. The usual stated goal is catching bugs and quality issues.
- The author, "mjd" (Mark Jason Dominus), is a well-known programmer and writer who has been active in the Perl community and broader software engineering discourse for decades.
- The post argues that many developers misunderstand code review's real purpose: it's not primarily about finding defects, but about sharing knowledge, maintaining consistent design standards, and ensuring the team collectively understands the codebase.
- This distinction matters because teams that treat review as only a bug-finding gatekeeping step often become slow and adversarial, while teams that treat it as a knowledge-sharing practice build better software more sustainably.