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Making the code correct is a shared responsibility between reviewer and author; if the code has a bug or doesn't even run that means both people missed the problem. Unless the author is very new/junior (still at a stage where they need close guidance on individual changes) then I would be more annoyed or concerned by an author who hasn't run their change at all than a reviewer who hasn't run it and misses some problem. But I guess it depends on the conventions of the organisation exactly what the balance of responsibility is.

As a reviewer (in the places I've worked so far) for me it depends what type of change it is. E.g., for a frontend change I might need to run it to be able to actually try it out and check what it looks like, whereas for a backend change I might rely more on reviewing the tests and if the tests look good then I probably wouldn't bother running locally to poke at the thing myself. Of course there are also just general issues of how big and how complicated the change is.

Anyway, wherever possible mechanical stuff like "does it build and run" should be covered by a CI system or other automation, not by spending reviewer time on it.




Letting the author run it could lead to "it ran on my pc" surprises.




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