Code review is a great process which gradually improves code quality. It is a system you can implement in many ways. In this post I’m going to grumble about one particular way of performing code reviews - when there is only one person responsible for doing code reviews and suggesting/accepting/rejecting changes.

Why code review should be a team effort:

Think how open source on GitHub works. There is usually one person (author) responsible for keeping the code right, and other people come and go. Do you want your organization to be built around the single person and do you want other people to come and go? Or maybe you are interested in building the team which you can trust to build a great product?

Do you always work on 100%? Can you operate at full capacity every day for the whole year? Will you be able to focus your full attention on the [2 + insert number here] reviews per day for the whole year? If you said yes then I don’t believe you. I actually like to do code reviews but I can do maybe like 3 small code reviews per day and I will do 2 in the morning and the last one after the lunch when my mind is fresh. There is still a chance that I will not find all the stuff that should be refactored. When the CR is big and I can not or don’t want to split it then I’ll do it for 3 days or more (yeah I’ve had few of those…​) and that is because I want to fully understand the problem and do my best to make it better. The more people will read your code the better because what you’ve missed someone else might notice.

If your organization is built around one person who knows everything I hope you pay a lot of money to this person to keep him/her on board and you are paying huge insurance on behalf of this key person. Code review is the fastest way of letting the team know how the things work. I strongly believe that everyone should know a little about a lot. This way you can go on long vacation and don’t be afraid to leave the phone in a hotel.

Habits are very powerful. Once you start doing something and you’ll get good at it will be hard to convince you to do your thing differently. If you are the only person who can accept or reject the change what are the chances that you’ll try something new and actually accept the change? You might not fully understand it or maybe you just don’t like the way it looks? If you are not the only person making the decision then team members can suggest some things they’d like to try. Giving it a spin might make the code base better place and maybe you’ll learn something new along the way. If not, well you’ve learned something anyway, right? Code review performed by meany peers will not only help you to change the habits but will also let you try or learn new things.

What you can understand - the senior developer with a lot of experience might not be as easy to comprehend for the junior. You should always write the code like it will be read by the inexperienced developer. If the senior is the only person who reads the code and he is very smart then your code base might grow unnecessary complex because he can handle the idea. Maybe not everyone on the team feels comfortable with this complexity? How many times you’ve written some function or module to find out later that there is ready to use library which does exactly that? Or maybe you’ve implemented a complex feature which could’ve been done in completely different way with less effort and without tons of comments explaining every step along the way? Do you trust your designated leader to know every available library? Maybe someone on the team knows the one?

I hope you get the idea already. Code review process should be organized around the team and for the team not just for the sake of being there. Multiple peers code review is better than code review done by the single person. The more people you engage in the code review process the more people you engage in the product creation. When doing multiple peers code reviews more people will be able to learn from the more experienced developers and maybe old dogs will learn one or two new tricks along the way?