code review

The practice of having one or more engineers read and critique code changes before they are merged into the main codebase. Code review catches bugs, enforces style standards, ensures correctness, and serves as a knowledge-sharing mechanism between team members. Pull requests (PRs) or merge requests (MRs) are the typical mechanisms through which code review happens in Git-based workflows.

When you'd see it: Engineering team norms, GitHub/GitLab workflows, quality discussions, new engineer onboarding.

Why it matters: Code review is the primary quality gate in software development. Teams without code review ship more bugs, accumulate more technical debt, and have less knowledge sharing between team members.

Common mistakes: Rubber-stamp reviews — approving code without actually reading it to meet a process requirement. Also: overly long PRs that are too large to review effectively. Small, focused PRs are easier to review and less risky to merge.

Related version control, CI/CD, technical debt, GitHub