Putting the human code review aside, one of the things I've been more impressed by during my time at Google has been the automated presubmits, generally the static analysis ones. I do a lot of Java, so Error Prone (https://errorprone.info/bugpatterns) has been a useful one (cf https://errorprone.info/bugpattern/FormatString); we have some others that Tricorder runs but I can't seem to find public references to.
One thing that's also an interesting challenge is the work it takes to make something a blocking presubmit: sometimes you don't get useful feedback from one, or maybe a test doesn't provide very good signal, and then people start force submitting to bypass the check because it's not providing utility, but in the process also skip other checks.
What so you mean by automated presubmits?
Are those „just“ CI checks for static analysis or is there more sophisticated things going on like merging it to a generated branch, deploying it, running all tests in the infrastructure there and more?
Can you elaborate a little bit more on this? Or point me to a resource that is doing this?
One thing that's also an interesting challenge is the work it takes to make something a blocking presubmit: sometimes you don't get useful feedback from one, or maybe a test doesn't provide very good signal, and then people start force submitting to bypass the check because it's not providing utility, but in the process also skip other checks.