Bear in mind I am pro code review, but...<p>There is a trick in pharmaceutical research where you test a potential candidate drug against placebo to yield a bad study that seems to show benefit. The reason it is a trick is because in many cases the alternative isn't placebo, it is an existing treatment. Then doctors learn about a more "modern" treatment, favor it for being modern and the better treatment may not be prescribed.<p>The alternatives to code review aren't doing nothing. The article claims that code reviews find a defect per 10 minutes--but only in the first ten minutes. By this same argument (ignore qualifications, extrapolate the numeric result), fast automated testing can potentially find thousands of defects in a second--if they run that quickly and the defects were already tested for. Static analysers, pair programming, documentation these are all alternatives and there are many more.<p>If you're spending an hour a day reviewing code then you are spending 12.5% of your time doing it. Using it that way comes with an opportunity cost that may be better spent depending on your particular organization and code base. Of course, analysing everything to death also has an opportunity cost, but not analysing it generally leads to moving goal posts where the supposed rationale for doing something keeps changing. Today its purpose is uncovering defects, tomorrow it is knowledge sharing, the day after it is security. It is all of those things, but other practices may achieve these goals with more effective use of time and people's patience.<p>So why am I pro code review? Because choosing to interact and work together as a team, to learn about and compromise with your colleagues makes for good team building while serving other technical purposes. I do think that pair programming can achieve this to a greater level while also being more taxing on individuals. This assumes you control the process and own it though, if it has just become a rote ceremony then my feelings are you probably aren't net benefitting from it: you are simply doing it because you have no choice, not because you believe it to be a valuable use of time. If you have experienced both, a culture where people choose and find value in code reviews and a culture where people are forced to do it unquestioningly, then you may have witnessed how a dicta can destroy the prosocial value of a practice.