TL;DR: Yes!

Code reviews are essential to good software development. In a code review, peers read each others’ code and vote to approve or reject the changes before committing them to the main code base. Code reviews provide a platform for constructive feedback, accountability, and even learning opportunities. To make them effective, a team must establish best practices – not only for the code itself, but also for the review process. Good guides can be found here, here, and here for reference. Some rules, such as “no personal attacks” and “focus only on the changes at hand,” are universally agreeable. Other rules, however, can cause controversy.

One such controversial rule is the title of this blog post: Should a code review be rejected for typos? I use the word “typos” here to broadly include any sort of typographical shortcoming: misspellings, incorrect grammar, poor formatting, and even improper spacing. For example, a variable named somehting would be a typo.

There are valid reasons why not to reject code reviews despite typos. The code itself will still compile and run, so long as the use of typo’ed identifiers is consistent. Requiring corrections takes extra time, which in business costs more money. Authors may also take offense, especially if English (or the language of dialogue) is their second language.

Nevertheless, I strongly believe that yes, code reviews should be rejected for typos. Below are five reasons why:

It corrects carelessness. Typos mean carelessness. Mistakes are bound to happen, but pervasive typos indicate a deeper, systemic problem. Reviews are a measure of accountability between peer engineers to prevent carelessness. Being tough on small things encourages engineers to straighten-up on all things.

It prevents future frustration. People expect things to be spelled and formatted the right way. Compiler error messages are often cryptic and may not intuitively point to typos. Imagine trying to call the do_stuff method, only to discover that the original method was named do_stuf after an hour of hair-pulling, fist-banging, and cursing at the screen. Frustrating is especially acute when BDD Gherkin steps have typos. Allowing typos to be committed to the code base increases the chances of this type of frustration.

It improves readability. Typos and poor formatting are distracting. They make it harder to read code. For example, I remember once reading a Perl source file in which every single line had an arbitrary number of indent spaces. It was impossible to visually align function bodies, if statements, and loops. I had to reformat it before I could work on it.

It boosts confidence in the code and in the team. Imagine if you saw typos in this blog post. Each typo you find would lower your confidence in my writing skills. The same is true for software: as a reviewer, when I see typos, I lose confidence in the quality of the code and in the author’s skills because I see carelessness. Eliminating typos not only makes code better, but it also makes people think better of the code.

It reinforces high standards. Quality is not limited to functionality. Poorly-written code may run correctly, but it will not be maintainable. Upholding high standards in code review will result in overall better code output. Letting small things slip through will, over time, atrophy a code base.

If “reject” sounds like a harsh word, it may be beneficial for a review process to indicate the severity of feedback points. For example, broken code could be “critical”, while typos could be “minor.” Nevertheless, typos should not be committed to the main code base, and thus their code reviews should be rejected.