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Ask HN: How much of your code review ends up as comments on style/form?

by crtlaltdel on 1/31/20, 4:21 PM with 1 comments

I have encountered a number of situations where a majority of code review comments for my team end up being (slightly pedantic) style/form related. Some times its a matter of naming conventions, others its something like `prefer const over let if no reassignment`.

It feels like a lot of this could/should be covered by linting rules. Am I the only one who runs into this?

  • by JohnFen on 1/31/20, 10:19 PM

    Except for one company I worked for, I'd say about 10% of the comments from my code reviews (and code reviews of others that I've attended) have been about this sort of thing. It tends to be brought up only if something is egregious (such as if the formatting or naming is likely to lead to confusion and error when other devs work on the code).

    The one exception is interesting -- it was the only place I've worked that did online code reviews rather than in-person ones.

    I disliked the online reviews for a number of reasons, the second largest being that the quality of the reviews were very, very low and the comments primarily consisted of the sort that you're talking about here. I think it's because those sorts of observations and comments are quick and easy to do, and devs tend to start just going through the motions rather than actually putting attention and thought into the review.

    For the record, the largest problem I had with the online version was that it omits the part where the dev walks through the code being reviewed, explaining what it all does. In my experience, that process alone provides half of the value of code reviews. I can't count the number of times that the dev (including myself) would be partway through this walkthrough and suddenly spot an issue that escaped him -- and would likely have escaped the reviewers as well.