When looking for possible improvements in terms of cost/burnt hour optimizations… code reviews are for most teams the last thing to look at. It's binary, we are doing code reviews, or not - nothing in between. Is it?

In this article I want to talk about how little change in code reviews can save your team a bunch of hours.

First, let me ask you a quick question: when your team do code reviews? Before or after the actual code is written?

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Take your time to answer

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Ok, If your answer is after you can skip this article, I have no advice for you today 😉

If you are like most of the teams and you do code reviews after the code is written - stay with me.

Another question: when do you change the oil in your car? Before or after your engine broke? I assume you are a wise human being and you do it before. So, why behave differently in terms of code reviews? Why you let yourself and/or others to broke the engine and then fix it, instead of change the oil before it broke up?

Ok, nice comparison, some of you still have no idea what am I talking about, but I really wanted to include this comparison. It was so cool when I figured it out 😀

Let me explain. Instead of allowing developers to work on the ticket silently, then check their work and point what should be fixed - Code review should be done before they start implementing their concept. So in fact it's no longer code review, it's a concept review. Each of us, developers, before start making things happened we need to have the idea how to solve the issue and in most cases code reviews are not passing because the initial idea was bad. If you'd share the idea how you want to solve the issue before starting to write any code, the person who is doing code review will have a chance to fix your bad or not good enough idea before you've burnt any hour. Isn't cool. For me it is, for you...maybe, for someone else it's cool too - so I'm talking to you who thinks it's cool. Think about it and try it, maybe it will be your favourite workflow, maybe you will save some hours, moods, badly written feedback, and other unpleasant outcomes of code reviews.

Cheers and stay safe.