Code Review

A systematic peer examination of source code to identify bugs, enforce style standards, and facilitate knowledge transfer across the engineering team.

Code review serves as the primary gatekeeper for software quality and maintainability. By utilizing tools like GitHub Pull Requests or Gerrit, teams achieve a 20 to 30 percent reduction in production defects while ensuring architectural consistency. This process transforms individual contributions into collective ownership: senior engineers mentor juniors through actionable feedback, while automated linters handle trivial syntax checks. Effective reviews focus on logic, security vulnerabilities, and test coverage (aiming for 80 percent or higher) to prevent technical debt from reaching the master branch.

https://google.github.io/eng-practices/review/