Enhancing the Code Review Process
It’s 6pm on a Tuesday, monitors go dark and your teammates are getting ready to leave for happy hour or to check out a new restaurant down the street. You stick around to submit your code for review on Github, after which you Slack its link to your team’s review channel. The next day, a slew of new review requests are posted, pushing your message to the previous day’s archives. By Thursday, still without reviews, you need to make another request, except this time with an @here, pinging everyone in the channel.
Outgrowing Slack
An efficient code review process is essential to an engineering team’s output of good code. As the gatekeepers to the Unite Us platform, we review each other’s work, making tweaks and suggesting changes to ensure that all code is ready to be shipped. When we had a smaller team of three to five developers, Slack was an effective way to request feedback and share code. But as our team grew, we found that messages would get lost in a flood of requests, requiring us to chase down reviewers or send re-requests to an unmanageable Slack channel.
Improving Workflow
In search of a more organized review process, we added Pull Approve to our workflow. This Github plugin automatically assigns code reviews to developers and notifies them of the request. It offers flexible configurations, allowing us to customize review teams and conditionally assign reviewers based on labels, statuses, or file names. Our primary goal in integrating this plugin was to evenly distribute reviewing responsibilities across the team. To accomplish this, our Pull Approve configuration assigns reviewers at random, choosing developers from a single list of our front-end team.
An Opportunity to Learn
Shuffling review assignments has improved team-wide exposure to more of the platform, which has pushed our team members to develop a deeper understanding of its different functionalities while collectively improving on our skillset. As a relatively new engineer on the front-end team, I have personally been encouraged to explore and review unfamiliar code regardless of its complexity. Greater visibility to our code base has also allowed me to hit the ground running when assigned new tasks.
Pull Approve has been one of the many ways that our team has scaled well. With this tool added to our workflow, we are guaranteeing that the code we ship is thoroughly reviewed by a diverse set of developers. As Unite Us’ client base and networks continue to expand, our front-end team of now thirteen developers will also likely see continued growth. A larger number of developers contributing to the platform will require an efficient code-review process, so we are continually looking for ways to improve it. Assigning code reviews via Pull Approve has proven to be a great place to start.
If you’d like to learn more about our Engineering team’s practices, reach out and view one of our open positions. We’d love to hear from you!
