Fake Code Review with ‘LGTM’

Blindly accepting Pull Requests with a meaningless comment is not Code Review. Do code review casually (old-school) but back up with real Automated E2E regression testing to prevent bad check-ins.

This article is one of the “Be aware of Fake Test Automation/DevOps Engineers” series.

Some fake Agile software companies focus on ‘sound good’ but poorly conducted practices, Code Review is one of them. The objective of Code Review is to verify a programmer’s check-in to make sure it follows coding standards and more importantly, will not break stuff.

Code Review, by its intention, is good. However, in reality, the practices used in some projects are laughable. Once I worked as a SET in a software team. One of the practices the management enforced was “Code Review” on Git Pull Request (PR). A developer created a pull request (a check-in for his work), and then someone else (reviewer) needed to review and accept it. In theory, the reviewer did a thorough code review of the pull request before he/she proved the PR.

It is absurd. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Git, called it “pure garbage”.