Apologies to all for the long delay between these. Work has been hectic and off hours I need my rest.

Schedule Reviews Before Big Changes is the next and penultimate of the Defect Tracking Patterns.

Sometimes a bug or group of related bugs will result in a change that affects large sections of the codebase, or significant changes to one component. Best practices would encourage small, incremental changes and ContinuousIntegration, but sometimes, for reasons outside the team's control, a large set of changes must happen all at once.

Therefore:

Before the programmer commits the changes to the team source repository, assign the bug report(s) to a reviewer, typically a team lead, senior programmer, or module owner, for an extra-careful check. The reviewer can examine the proposed fix for compatibility, suitability, and overall conformance with direction of development. Reviewers should be timely in their responses, and reassign the reviewed bug back to the programmer with approval or suggestions for changes. Once reviewed, the programmer can go ahead and integrate the fix.

It's assumed the team is doing normal revies all the time, either formal, informal, or through pair programming. If the only reviews the team does are before big changes, that's an anti-pattern, and also a failure to follow the CoordinateEfforts rule.