Rapid code reviews

Code reviews are a big cause of delays in many development teams. There is a very easy solution to this. Agree as a team that code cannot be integrated into the build until the code review is passed and make code reviews a top priority interrupt for the dev team with a goal to complete them within 1 hour or less.

It works like this. Dev A submits a pull request to integrate their code into the build. This triggers a code review request that must be approved by someone else in the Dev team. Dev A asks “Who can do a code review for me?” Dev C says “I’ve just finished something so I can do it” Dev C spends 15 minutes reviewing the code with Dev A in a one on one conversation asking for explanations and making suggestions. Dev A makes some changes and asks Dev C to look at them. Dev C approves the code review and the code is merged.

Dev C learns about the code that Dev A has written and learns some interesting new methods that improved their coding skills. Dev A finds flaws in their code and learns some things from Dev C. Code structure and maintainability is much improved and bugs are avoided.

Ive been doing this since 2004. Its easy and works very well.

Raj Nagappan is writing a much more detailed post about this topic explaining his experience and some other solutions.