Improving Your Team’s Code Review Culture

Creating a system that empowers your team.

Code reviews are one of the most productive tasks we do each day. When done well, they ensure code quality, promote knowledge sharing, and strengthen the team. Code reviews give developers the confidence that the code they contribute is as good as possible and let everyone in the team have a say about the direction of the codebase and the standard the team holds their code to. They let the team intervene before technical debt becomes a problem and provide opportunities for positive feedback and celebrating improvements.

However, we often end up with a set of processes and a culture that doesn’t work so well. There may be seemingly innocuous problems where reviews are at the bottom of everyone’s priority list and take an extra couple of days to complete. Where reviews become entangled with company-wide rules and expectations. Where no-one appreciates the value that code reviews provide a team. We may have reviews where people waste time looking for the wrong things and don’t take advantage of automation. In some cases, we can end up with more troublesome problems, where the pressure is too high and the risk of missing something too dangerous. Where reviews become home to harmful and toxic behavior, of which both reviewers and reviewees can be guilty.