Should one create code review for an incomplete unfinished change?

Question

Had this happened:

A developer make a new feature, but not working, since last year, total code change is 100+files and 10k lines.

Until recently, with help of another developer, get it to work.

Now the code review is huge to include all changes.

Seems there is a common sense that unfinished incomplete change shouldn't be sent for code review. So how to deal with this situation?

A change of this dimension should not be done by a single developer. It will cause huge merge problems or a standstill of other development. Code review is a problem here but not your biggest one. — Hans-Martin Mosner, Jul 15 '19 at 05:17
Apart from code review, is there a spec or a model of what this large amount of code does? If I was writing that much code I'd be writing modules and testing them against the model and expected test results and having modules code reviewed as I go along. I think Hans-Martin has a good point. — Ant, Jul 15 '19 at 05:24
see also: What to do when code submitted for code review appears to be too complicated? — gnat, Jul 15 '19 at 06:28

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 15 '19 at 07:30

The answer here is fairly simple: don't get yourself into this situation in the first place. I don't care that it's an "independent module", you should still have split it up into chunks which were individually reviewable in the first place. Obviously I don't know what domain this is, but you're still going to have something like data access bits, business logic bits, UI bits and some utility code as well. Write each individual chunk separately and get it reviewed separately.

Should one create code review for an incomplete unfinished change?

1 Answers1