I've been facing a troubling issue where bugs are making it to production despite having a solid deployment pipeline. I've found myself waking up at 3 AM about twice a week due to obvious issues that should have been caught during code review. For example, there was a recent null pointer exception that a good review would have identified, and the week prior we faced a race condition that knocked out our payment service. The problem isn't due to lazy reviewers, but rather the fact that after 4+ hours of reviewing code, people inevitably miss things. I'm exploring better tooling in the review process instead of just relying on monitoring post-deployment. I've started integrating automated checks into the pipeline; tools like Greptile look promising for identifying logic errors before they reach reviewers, although I'm still gathering data to see if they actually reduce incidents. I'd love to hear about your experiences in minimizing issues during review stages compared to catching them post-deployment. Are there any metrics you track to measure how effective your code reviews are?
5 Answers
I think this issue is more about testing than the code review itself. Code reviews usually focus on design and architecture rather than spotting every potential error like an out-of-bounds index. What you really need is robust unit and integration tests to catch those bugs before they make it to production.
It's important to remember that your deployment pipeline might not be as solid as you think. If you’re getting woken up regularly, it indicates gaps in your automated checks. Make sure you're also implementing thorough pre-deployment tests.
Code reviews should not be the only quality assurance step. Incorporating static analysis tools, linters, and automated tests into your process can really help. They can catch a lot of the issues before they even reach the review stage.
You might want to reconsider who gets paged for incidents. Ideally, it should be the dev team responsible for the code that breaks, not the DevOps team. They should roll back and fix their own mistakes.
Make sure the developers are part of the on-call rotation. When they have to deal with the consequences, they'll start taking quality more seriously. We found that it drastically reduces the number of issues once developers see the impact of their code first-hand.
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