One of the most powerful tools for guarding code quality is the code review. When working with Git, a pull request needs to be performed to merge the changes of a developer back into the mainline. A pull request allows one or more other developers to review all changes and comment on them. The developer that opened the pull request can review the comments and make changes accordingly, increasing the quality of the changes while they keep working.

For code reviews to work at their best, it is important not to see them as a gate that you must get your changes through with as little effort as possible. It is much more fruitful to have an open attitude based on the assumption that everyone is trying to create high-quality code, and see the code review as a starter of a discussion on code quality. It is important to change perspectives, from seeing the code review as an annoying ritual in software development where others will complain about your code to an opportunity for welcoming others to give their input about your code and helping you to write code of higher quality.

Once such an attitude is in place, code reviews will become a source of learning. They will result in discussions between peers about the best way forward for tackling an issue: the best way not just for now, but for the future as well, taking no technical debt and having enough unit and integration tests along with the code that is to be merged. Code reviews are also a great tool for mentoring junior developers, allowing them to receive feedback on their own work. It can even be more valuable to have junior developers review the code of senior developers. This way, they can ask questions about things they do not yet know, and it will often lead to them pointing out overly complex solutions that might become technical debt over time.