Inside Out

Better code reviews

This weekend I’ve been thinking about the most productive code reviews in some of the teams I’ve worked with. This post lays down some (very) opinionated ground rules.

TLDR; Awesome code reviews are small in size, contained in scope and short lived.

The premise

Just one! Developer productivity.

A productive developer is a happy developer, she spends most of her time in making things better, crafting beautiful experiences or fixing the not so great ones. She’s a great advocate of the product. She participates and stays engaged in processes and product improvements.

A non productive developer spends most of the time in the who part of a problem. She keeps complaining about deadlocks with other parts of the system. She is kind of frustrated with day to day stuff. A prolonged exposure to harmful activities/notions might have led to a learned helplessness. She may suffer from burn outs and eventually lose faith on goodness :D

Inefficient code review processes slows us down. Let’s talk about making code reviews better in three roles.

A developer should…

A reviewer should…

A team should…

What are your favorite code review ground rules?