Trust is defined by evidence and system properties, not by familiarity or author. Any actor—human or machine—requires verification proportionate to risk.
Code review is a mechanism for surfacing missing trust, not for creating it. If review is the only trust mechanism, the system has a bottleneck, not a process.
Risk classification of a change, not its author, determines the necessary verification bar. Low-risk changes require automated checks; high-risk changes demand robust human oversight and adversarial testing.
The cost of distrust manifests in review burden, slowed cycle time, and diverted senior-engineer attention. Organizations incur significant expense when they over-verify low-risk changes.
The first question for any change: what does the system measure, and what does it reward?
Trust is defined by evidence and system properties, not by familiarity or author. Any actor—human or machine—requires verification proportionate to risk.
Code review is a mechanism for surfacing missing trust, not for creating it. If review is the only trust mechanism, the system has a bottleneck, not a process.
Risk classification of a change, not its author, determines the necessary verification bar. Low-risk changes require automated checks; high-risk changes demand robust human oversight and adversarial testing.
The cost of distrust manifests in review burden, slowed cycle time, and diverted senior-engineer attention. Organizations incur significant expense when they over-verify low-risk changes.
The first question for any change: what does the system measure, and what does it reward?
After 20 years in software development, Norman is both a hands-on leader and defining the new age of AI SDLC for some of the biggest brands in the world — and exploring it with the builders. He writes here about things he is hearing and seeing. All posts are his personal points of view and do not reflect any employer or any customer he has ever had contact with.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the positions of any employer, client, or affiliated organization.
