Firstly, encouraging and structuring code review in academia. My own code is almost entirely solo (and messy), so a venue for structured review and an incentive to robustify public code is good. Secondly, the culture in some disciplines is that code is not citable, only papers - and JOSS is an end-run around this. I hope this second situation is changing, but we're not there yet so JOSS has a valuable role for the moment in simply being a 'journal' assigning DOIs basically for code packages.
Does JOSS specify e.g. ReviewBoard, GitHub Pull Request reviews, or Gerrit for code reviews?
I don't want to oversell the depth of the code review possible; not all of the reviewers will be fully expert in whatever tiny cutting-edge area the package is for (making correctness checks difficult beyond the test suite), and most of us are academics-who-code rather than research software engineers. But the fact it's happening at all is a great step forward.
[0]: https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues [1]: https://joss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/review_criteria.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_review
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_peer_review
I'd add "Antipatterns" > "Software" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern#Software_design
and "Code smells" > "Common code smells" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell#Common_code_smells
and "Design smells" for advanced reviewers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_smell
and the CWE "Common Weakness Enumeration" numbers and thus URLs for Issues from the CWE Top 25 and beyond: https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/
FWIW, many or most scientists are not even trying to be software engineers: they just write slow code without reusing already-tested components and expect someone else to review Pull Requests after their PDF is considered impactful. They know enough coding to push the bar for their domain a bit higher each time.
Are there points for at least in-writing planing for the complete lifecycle and governance of an ongoing thesis defense of open source software for science; after we publish, what becomes of this code?