Engineering Practice and Careers

Code review is the practice of having one or more other developers examine a proposed change before it becomes part of the shared codebase, typically through the pull request workflow described earlier in this module. Beyond catching outright bugs, a good review checks for adherence to the codebase's conventions, considers whether the chosen approach will be maintainable as the system grows, and spreads knowledge of the codebase across the team rather than concentrating it in whoever wrote a given piece of code. Effective review culture tends to treat feedback as being about the code rather than the person who wrote it, distinguishes between blocking issues and optional suggestions, and keeps individual reviews reasonably small and focused, since very large changes are demonstrably harder to review carefully and more likely to hide real problems. Done well, code review functions as both a quality gate and a form of ongoing mentorship, letting less experienced developers absorb practices from more experienced ones through direct, concrete feedback on real work.