Code review culture does matter

#codereview #deliverance

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so slow that some PR's were stuck in the in review column for more than a month, those developments were a lost couse, outdated and with several conflicts, more work was needed to update them that the work needed to develop them in the first place.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