In my experience, code reviews provide a gloss level review of the change or enhancement.
Also a giant impact is if the change is small, the code review will be of higher value.
If the change is large, the code review will be of little value.
If the change is gigantic, the code review will be of infinitesimal value.
Unless the code reviewer is well-versed and up-to-date on that area of code, it's easy to code review the picayune nits and complete miss the pink elephants in the code.
Whereas, anecdotally, in the few times that I participated in pair programming, which entails continuous code reviews, the code quality was far higher. The continuous code review provided significantly more value.
Here's a couple interesting essays about code reviews, from Microsoft:
In my experience, code reviews provide a gloss level review of the change or enhancement.
Also a giant impact is if the change is small, the code review will be of higher value.
If the change is large, the code review will be of little value.
If the change is gigantic, the code review will be of infinitesimal value.
Unless the code reviewer is well-versed and up-to-date on that area of code, it's easy to code review the picayune nits and complete miss the pink elephants in the code.
Whereas, anecdotally, in the few times that I participated in pair programming, which entails continuous code reviews, the code quality was far higher. The continuous code review provided significantly more value.
Here's a couple interesting essays about code reviews, from Microsoft: