Most teams treat code review as a defect filter. The research says that is the wrong scoreboard. Bacchelli & Bird (ICSE 2013) studied modern code review at Microsoft. They surveyed 873 engineers and analyzed reviewer comments across multiple teams. The headline finding is uncomfortable: "finding defects" is the most-stated motivation for doing code review — but defects are not what dominates the actual review output. Most comments fall into: Code improvement suggestions — refactor this, simpler approach, name it better. Knowledge transfer — explaining why the existing code looks the way it does, surfacing context only one teammate had. Awareness and team alignment — teaching the reviewer about a part of the system, socializing a design choice across the org. Defects — present, but a minority of comments. The implication for how we run reviews is real. 1. Stop measuring reviewers by defects found. That metric optimizes for the wrong thing.…