I've noticed some frustrating patterns on various teams lately. PRs sometimes sit for days without review or are hastily approved with barely a glance. When merges happen, they can cause issues downstream, and new developers often feel lost navigating legacy code or waiting endlessly for reviews. I'm curious about how different teams tackle these problems, specifically:
1. How do you make sure the right person reviews a PR?
2. What methods do you use to catch potentially risky changes before merging?
3. How does your team onboard new developers into complicated parts of the codebase?
I'd love to hear what strategies or tools you've found effective in addressing these issues, or if you've just opted to deal with them as they come.
7 Answers
Consider lowering your Work In Progress (WIP) limits. Also, try holding daily "office hours" dedicated to PR reviews and onboarding. This focused time can lead to significant improvements in both areas.
One major reason for slow PRs could be the absence of automated testing. If your team is still doing everything manually, it can seriously hinder the efficiency of your code reviews.
This strikes me as a fundamental process issue that's been neglected for too long, negatively impacting code quality. A cohesive team should regularly check in on each other's work, and it’s vital to track tasks collectively. Anything pending review is essentially wasted effort; the priority should be to push work through to completion as swiftly as possible. Also, technical debt can be a significant hinderance, stemming from messy code and a lack of documentation. Fixing these requires a proactive approach integrated into our schedule, just like any other work task.
What really clicked for our team was implementing automated PR analysis, which flags risky changes and suggests reviewers based on their familiarity with the code. Additionally, solid PR templates and keeping a code ownership file have made a big difference in streamlining our review process. Sometimes it's just about sticking to good practices rather than looking for fancy tools.
To combat slow reviews and onboarding, we encourage live PR reviews. This way, the feedback is immediate, and issues can be addressed in real-time, which helps keep things moving.
I’ve found that not every change needs a PR when working in an agile context. Sometimes, smaller changes can be incorporated directly without a formal review. Pair programming can also serve as a continuous review mechanism. Coupled with good practices like feature flags and automated tests, the risks are minimized. Major changes may still warrant wider discussion, but most PRs feel like checklists rather than actual quality checks.
Have you thought about using an AI code reviewer like CodeRabbit? It can help highlight everything from typos to more complex refactoring needs, making the PR review workflow more manageable by acting as a first touchpoint to catch errors early.
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