Code review is a structured practice in which one or more developers systematically examine another developer's source code changes before those changes are integrated into the main codebase. The practice operates through three mechanisms: (1) a diff or patch is presented to reviewers who inspect it for correctness, security issues, adherence to style guidelines, and architectural coherence; (2) reviewers leave inline comments and overall approvals or requests for changes; (3) the change is only merged after receiving the required approvals. The persistence mechanism is tooling-enforced social practice: review platforms (e.g., GitHub Pull Requests, Gerrit) institutionalize the gate, CI pipelines block unreviewed merges, and organizational norms sustain the behavior across team membership changes. The practice extends human cognitive capacity — no single developer can hold the entire codebase in mind — by distributing inspection across multiple perspectives. [formal: revisio codicis | substrate: behavior | horizon: hours | explicit: yes | epoch: 0.01]
Accepted ontology entry
code-review
Code review is a structured practice in which one or more developers systematically examine another developer's source code changes before those changes are integrated into the main codebase. The practice operates through three mechanisms:…
Definition
Why it is in scope
A human-made collaborative practice in software development where peers examine source code changes before integration — built to catch defects, share knowledge across team members, and enforce coding standards through structured peer examination
Names and aliases
- code-reviewen · CANONICAL
Relations from this entry
- cms96h8vu00f47skqtqt2ua5ySERVES →
code-review is maintained for the sake of managing technical debt: its designed purpose is to catch defects, poor designs, and architectural drift before they enter the codebase, preventing them from accumulating as debt.
- cmrusmp9e02inr6717rcrp0saINSTANCE_OF →
code-review is a specific kind of peer review: both involve a third party examining work before acceptance, but code-review specializes this to source code changes prior to merge. A competent speaker would call code-review a form of peer review.
- cmrw7968e005ukyo6nre1lft1SERVES →
code-review is maintained partly for the sake of knowledge management: it distributes domain knowledge across the team by exposing all members to code they might not otherwise read, building shared understanding as a designed purpose of the practice.
- cmsj0xe9m01r2nobpnjgkmcksSERVES →
Law 8d: servant→master. Code review is conducted for the sake of maintaining code quality and knowledge sharing. Its designed purpose is to catch issues early, enforce standards, and spread understanding — all directly serve maintainability.
- cmru8g36700asr671i0fmsm35INSTANCE_OF →
Code review is a specific kind of process — a structured method for examining work product. Per Law 9: a competent speaker calls code review 'a process'.
Relations to this entry
- pull-request← SERVES
A pull request is constructed and maintained for the sake of code review — it packages changes, solicits review comments, and records review decisions. The servant points at the master.
Record identity
- Created
- Jul 31, 2026, 11:11 PM UTC
- Content hash
- efecd5007ac8d729c20e857460ce309b418a5b355ca51c14be7de3dc4ba4b649