A Drupal Core Maintainer shares peer code review best practices
summary
Peer code review finds far more bugs than tests alone: informal reviews catch about 60% of defects, formal reviews combined with design and QA reach 90%+, and reviews can reduce defects by 80–90% compared with post‑release fixes. Use automated tools (static analysis, linters, phpcs, Drupal CI, GitLab CI) to eliminate nitpicks, split changes into small chunks and include tests and docs, keep changes small — aim for <=400 lines per review and review in short sessions to avoid decision and attention fatigue.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction and speaker intro
- 1:02Drupal core maintainer role
- 2:06Purpose of peer code review
- 9:01Psychology behind code review
- 13:21Defect detection research
- 20:00Optimizing for reviewable code
- 25:40Handling nitpicks in reviews
- 29:54Optimizing change sets for reviewers
- 38:38Key review recommendations
- 43:12Tools and resources for reviews
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