How do you and your team make code reviews more valuable?

Neil Wheelhouse has recently published a new article with us about code reviews entitled:

The Six Thinking Hats: A Catalyst For Fast And Effective Software Reviews

In the article he discusses different ways to improve technical reviews of software using the heuristic of ‘Six thinking hats’. Which got me wondering, how do other teams facilitate code reviews? Are there techniques and tricks you and your team use to get the most out of a code review?

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One team I was working with came up with a cool concept. Where if you developed anything on your own, you had to submit that and get it approved in a code review, but if you pair programmed on the task you could merge it. (You still send out a pull request for transparency reasons so anyone interested could have a look at it). On top of this we also commonly had walkthroughs more than review for big changes. I.e. the entire team (6) sat infront of a big monitor where the creators explained their thinking and solution.

I liked the question asked by Uncle Bob, how much time should you spend on reviewing a solution that took 8 hours to create? Where my experience is that people spend way to little time in reviewing for it to be dramatically useful, which is why I favour pair programming over reviews and the above solution is elegant.

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