Fragments: March 19

David Poll points out the flawed premise of the argument that code review is a bottleneck To be fair, finding defects has always been listed as a goal of code review – Wikipedia will tell you as much. And sure, reviewers do catch bugs. But I think that framing dramatically overstates the bug-catching role and understates everything else code review does. If your review process is primarily a bug-finding mechanism, you’re leaving most of the value on the table. Code review answers: “Should this be part of my product?” That’s close to how I think about it. I think of code review as primarily about keeping the code base healthy. And although many people think of code review as pre-integration review done on pull requests, I look at code review as a broader activity both done earlier (Pair Programming) and later (Refinement Code Review). At Firebase, I spent 5.5 years running an API council… The most valuable feedback from that council was never “you have a bug in this spec.” It was “this