At the request of a few folks, I've done some research on how the open source project Launchpad does code review and deployment.

In Launchpad, all developers are also code reviewers for about a day a week. All developers write "merge proposals" and attach them to their branches, and their colleagues review those branches and proposals within a day. Code reviewing is not primarily a gate to keep bugs out of code, but a social step, to get a second set of eyes on code, and to spread knowledge around. After code review, and automated testing on an EC2 instance, the developer lands the branch in trunk, a developer QAs it, and it gets deployed onto production in a matter of days or hours.

A few key differences from MediaWiki:

* No volunteer reviewers, small volunteer contributor community * Review trainees have already seen what a good code review looks like, perhaps need less training * Started with backlog of less than a week's worth of commits

I've stuck a more detailed description here:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Sumanah/Launchpad-dev-process

in case people want to get some ideas before the code review discussion tomorrow:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review_management/July_2011_training