An Alternative To Code Reviews

Problem

I'm not generally a huge fan of code reviews or giving people a dedicated chunk of time to review code, as it doesn't usually work as effectively as you may hope. People waste time focussing on manual reconfigurations and, therefore, don't have as much time to build using the code they have developed.

Actions taken

Different teams will deliver different levels of quality, so your code review should be integrated into your process of delivery. It can be useful to give people DevOps tools in order to support your team. This could include Slack integrations to keep people involved and up-to-date or giving everyone a thumbnail snapshot of what code was there previously and what has been checked in to keep everyone accountable and prevents people from delivering low-quality code. Automate as much of your code review as possible and let your team know about the benefits of increased automation. Namely, automation prevents people from having to rely upon manual testers or QA testers.

Lessons learned

You should be able to trust your staff members to deliver code to a high level of quality and to automate to a certain level. When you write automation out of your own functional code, this also helps to make you a stronger owner, as you can start building with the code you are writing as opposed to being constantly stuck making manual configurations to that one piece of code.