Code Reviews

I believe code reviews are a high-value activity (which I’ve written about before), but they take time and slow down your development process. With a few simple tricks, you can make it easier for reviewers to understand your changes, allowing them to give you better feedback faster. Not only does this save everyone time, but it also improves the quality of your code.

Make your intentions understood

Good commit messages and review titles are important. It may be (and in fact, should be) obvious from your code change what you’re trying to do, but a good message is still important. There are lots of cases where someone needs to scan the change list, and good messages make this a lot easier. It also helps your reviewer understand what you’re doing.

I am a strong advocate for code reviews. They have many advantages including improving code quality and team communication. On the other hand, they take a lot of time and add yet another delay to the development pipeline. With the wrong team culture, they can create hard feelings and discourage honest collaboration. This is a heavy price to pay, and yet, I’ve seen many teams that do them without ever talking about how or why.