Code-Review culture does matter.

Some time ago I found myself working for a company with great social and professional culture, working there felt great, but... it didn't last long.

I realized that there were some organizational issues that were impacting greatly on the engineering team performance:

• Definition of responsibilities was lacking
• Devs were mainly working alone with poor team communication
• Only few development standards and practices were set.

Among those issues, I was always struggling with an specific problem: getting my PR's reviewed, approved and merged.

Deliverance was so slow that some PR's were stuck in the in review column for more than a month, those developments were a lost couse, outdated and with several conflicts, more work was needed to update them that the work needed to develop them in the first place.

I found myself working in a startup with a very poor code-review culture.

After reading and investigating a while I found that there are some practices that can be adopted to strengthen your code review culture, boost deliverance and build a better team. The next practices are based on a talk by Derek Prior (link) and some other readings.

¿How to prepare for and improve your code review culture?

• As a team, decide your process and what to expect of reviews and make responsibilities clear:
  • Number of reviews before merging
  • Who can merge?
  • Can I merge my own PR?
  • How should I ask for review?
  • Who and why should be reviewing my code?
• Take in mind that code review does not include QA
• Adopt a styleguide and outsource it

¿What are the benefits of a strong code review culture?

• Better code - quality discussions improve code quality
• Better developers - Conflict are good for learning, in a healthy way
• Team ownership - Remove modular dependencies and win developer's versatility
• Healthy debate - More meaningful technical discussions in a proactive culture
• A better place to work

Rules of Engagement

¿What to do as an author?

• Provide sufficient context. Explain your changes and avoid context hunting. If content is king, then context is God (Gary Vaynerchuk).
• Explain why you chose that solutions, not everyone thinks like you.
• ¿You learned something new and useful? Document it! It can help others.

¿What to do as a reviewer?

• Ask, don't tell. Write your observations as a question instead of demanding a change. Asking the right questions the right way results in a better technical discussion.
• Offer compliments and be positive. Comment the code that you find useful and of quality with a compliment.

In practice

¿How to handle disagreements?

• Agree to disagree. There's different ways to get things done.
• Create a discussion and be open to new alternatives. If you don’t know which is better, ask.
• Ask for a tie breaker opinion.

¿What should I be reviewing anyway?

• Single responsibility principle
• Naming, easier to understand and discuss
• Complexity
• Test Coverage
• Look for bugs involving your area of expertise

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Interested? Read these articles for more tips and information:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJjmw9TRB7s
https://thoughtbot.com/blog/five-tips-for-more-helpful-code-reviews
https://chelseatroy.com/2019/12/18/reviewing-pull-requests/