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Discussion on: How do you incentivise developers to open small pull requests?

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Dylan Jhaveri

Are the developers on your team responsible for code reviewing each-other's PRs? In my opinion all developers on the team should be code reviewing each-other (vs. having a small number of senior level engineers that are the bottleneck for all code reviews).

As someone who is reviewing code it's much more difficult to review big PRs vs. small changes. If everyone is responsible for reviewing then everyone will understand that pain and be incentivized to open small PRs because they know how it feels to be on the other side of a bit PR review.

Next, set expectations that software can and should be shipped behind feature flags. If your team can adopt this and start following it then it makes smaller PRs easier because code can be merged and deployed without affecting users in production. There's other benefits and reasons that getting your team used to releasing behind feature flags is a good practice but smaller PRs is one of them.