When working in mentoring/coaching a new team I use code reviews as a great tool for sharing knowledges, creating common practices and spreading a culture.

Such a team needs to self-build all what is needed to achieve a Devops culture.
As a strategy to reach that goal we need to multiply collaboration opportunities: workshops, discussions, pair programming, mob programming…

The team also has to work on the production environment and we are obliged to compose work in progress while taking this into account.

Mob-programming all the time cannot be an option as it is not fitting the constraints.

Pair programming is used day one but is not enough and quite slow when you need to align the hole team.

So I use code reviews as a Show&Tell workshops with the hole team.
Not as a blocking process and trust burden!

When the team gets the needed maturity on a certain ticket’s category, we remove code reviews as pair programming, with any one in the time becomes a better choice, or even pushing directly into production, may be enough.

Now this said, code review step may represent bigger disadvantages and a blocking burden in case there is no mentoring, no ‘pulling skills up’ process in place.

#agileprinciples #craftsmanship
#continuousdelivery #devopsessentials