Code reviews are important, everyone knows that. But very few engineers pay attention to the process unless they are forced to.
As an engineering leader one of your job is to ensure the health of your codebase. A good code review process will help you maintain right balance between developer velocity and high code quality.
Train your engineers for code review
Do not assume that everyone knows the code review process. Different engineers come from different backgrounds. Every new engineer on the team must be presented with highlights of your code review process. All of them must be asked to work as code reviewers as well even if they may not have sufficient context.
Create a process for PR request documentation
Always force developers to write details PR request descriptions. Take advice from senior developers as to what this template for description may look like.
Create a readability program
Google has a readability program for their engineers. Each developer is required to either go through a code readability program or always add a readability reviewer to the code reviews.
It might not be possible for you to create such process but you can use standard static analysis tools to force certain basic code hygiene on the developers.
Automate as much as you can
With things like LLMs the code generation has become extremely powerful. Use it for your advantage. Insist on using assistive ai like Github Copilot to help developers write code that is more in line with your organization standards. Then use static analysis tools and services such as SonarCube to do automated checks.
Code Reviews for Frontends
For front end code such as react you also need to have a process to do some tests that are hard to catch via unit tests. Things such as accessibility must be tested and code review process must ensure that accessibility testing has occurred.
Conclusion
As an engineering leader always think deeply about code quality and the process which adds more code to your code repository.
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