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Does a code review provide the necessary time for someone unfamiliar with the code base to understand all of the business logic that will be affected and where this new addition sits within that hierarchy? Code reviews have never seemed contextually rich to me.

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I think the theory is that for code review to be its best, it sits on a contextual pyramid composed of reviewed design docs, pair programming, standups, and all the rest of it. That the "reviewers" are not hearing about the background, motivations, alternatives that were considered, broad implementation choices, etc etc for the first time when the PR goes up.

But often there are some or all of those pieces missing, and so yeah, code review ends up being a bit shallow and performative.

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