As a team manager overseeing a group of talented developers, I'm constantly seeing the common pain points associated with code reviews and pull request management.
With a team size of approximately six developers and a broader organization comprising around 200 developers, it became evident that our existing approach was falling short.
The traditional method involved throwing PRs into the team's communication channel, resulting in the need to ping team members for reviews constantly. This approach proved to be suboptimal, with developers often experiencing unnecessary delays, and PRs occasionally being forgotten or overlooked.
Experimenting with a New Approach
To address these challenges, we experimented to integrate code reviews seamlessly into our daily workflow. During our daily standup meetings, we started assigning unreviewed PRs to each team member based on relevancy, code ownership, and availability. This approach aimed to make code reviews an integral part of our daily routine, ensuring that reviews were completed on time and reducing the need for continuous follow-ups and pings among team members.
The Results and Benefits
The implementation of our new approach yielded promising results. Developers were more proactive in completing their assigned reviews, taking ownership of their time slots, and allocating dedicated periods for code reviews. This proactive mindset expedited the review process and reduced the effort required to coordinate and ping other team members for reviews. The overall impact was a significant reduction in the time it took to merge code, enhanced collaboration, and increased team productivity.
Seeking Further Insights
While our new approach has shown considerable success, we believe in the power of shared knowledge and continuous improvement. We invite fellow engineering managers and developers to share their experiences and provide additional insights into reducing code merge time and improving collaboration. By fostering a community of learning and collaboration, we can collectively refine our practices and optimize the code review process.
From that experiment, we created devoro. It's a simple Slack bot that sends a Daily Digest report of all open PRs before your daily standup--creating accountability between team members and reducing pickup time.
Curious to know if any other devs here adopted a similar workflow? How did it end up working for you?
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