How to Enforce Code Review Policies

Why code review policies matter

Code review is the last human checkpoint before code reaches production. Yet most teams rely on informal norms—undocumented expectations that vary between reviewers, time zones, and sprint pressure. The result: inconsistent quality, missed vulnerabilities, and frustrated engineers.

Common enforcement gaps

Even teams with branch protection rules enabled often miss critical governance gaps:

• No minimum reviewer count enforced for specific file paths (e.g., infrastructure, security-sensitive code)
• Self-approvals or rubber-stamp reviews go undetected
• No visibility into review turnaround time or bottlenecks
• Agent-authored PRs bypass human review policies entirely

GitHub branch protection is not enough

GitHub's branch protection rules cover the basics—required reviews, status checks, linear history. But they don't answer the harder questions: Was the reviewer qualified? Did the review happen within your SLA? Did the PR description match the actual diff? These are governance questions, and they require a layer above what GitHub provides natively.

How Warestack enforces review policies

Warestack treats every PR as a structured delivery event. When a PR is opened, updated, or merged, Warestack runs agentic checks that validate your team's review policies in real time:

• Require domain-specific reviewers for files matching path patterns
• Detect self-approvals and flag them before merge
• Enforce review SLAs with time-based alerts
• Validate that agent-authored code receives human oversight
• Track intent-to-diff alignment to catch rubber-stamp reviews

Setting up review governance

Start by defining your team's review expectations as Warestack agreements. Agreements are declarative policies—like "all PRs touching /infra must have 2 approvals from the platform team." Warestack continuously validates these against incoming events and surfaces violations in your monitoring dashboard, Slack, or Linear.