Discussing Code Reviews with Tech Leads

I sat my two tech leads down last week and went over a draft of our new code review process. They were OK with the general approach and idea, but they did have two things to add:

  1. You’re going to present this to the team.
  2. We probably won’t need to do these after a little while since everyone will be on the same page.

On #1 I did plan on working up a short presentation to the team, but I understood they really wanted to make sure there was management support for it. Code reviews aren’t exactly popular. And #2 I certainly hope that we’ll have a lot fewer mandatory recommendations, but I think we’ll be adopting them as a regular practice. If the team wants to switch to say some light pairing or we run into other issues of course who knows. At the end of the day I think getting the team to adopt TDD is a bigger goal than having regular code reviews. In some ways it’s really just meant to be a supporting practice.