Required Code Reviews

Ben Kamens posted today about changing his opinion on required code reviews from the negative to the positive after a change in policy at Khan Academy.

Having moved within a company from a team that had nothing close to approaching a code review policy, to a team that almost-religiously does code reviews on changes regardless of size (with one caveat, it’s not required for someone to “OK” each review/change), I can safely say that having a code review process is a huge bellwether of the overall quality of a software team.

I would never want to work with a team in the future that didn’t already do code reviews. It makes such a huge difference in the quality of the code produced, the level of understanding of each person on the team as to how things actually work, and education among people on the team in all sorts of ways (on best practices, tips and tricks, cultural things the team prefers, etc). It doesn’t slow you down, or increase the amount of process - it just makes sense.

As a developer, looking at code all day is what you should be doing in the first place anyway.

Khan Academy’s official policy on code reviews is a good read too.