Code reviews should be part of the software engineering team process regardless of the development model. Furthermore, the team should learn to execute reviews in a timely manner. Pull requests (PRs) left hanging can cause additional merge problems and go stale resulting in lost work. Qualified PRs are expected to reflect well-defined, concise tasks, and thus be compact in content. Reviewing a single task should then take relatively little time to complete.
To ensure that the code review process is healthy, inclusive and meets the goals stated above, consider following these guidelines:
- Establish a service-level agreement (SLA) for code reviews and add it to your teams working agreement.
- Although modern DevOps environments incorporate tools for managing PRs, it can be useful to label tasks pending for review or to have a dedicated place for them on the task board - Customize AzDO task boards
- In the daily standup meeting check tasks pending for review and make sure they have reviewers assigned.
- Junior teams and teams new to the process can consider creating separate tasks for reviews together with the tasks themselves.
- Utilize tools to streamline the review process - Code review tools
- Foster inclusive code reviews - Inclusion in Code Review
If the team is finding that code reviews are taking a significant time to merge, and it is becoming a blocker, consider the following additional recommendations:
- Measure the average time it takes to merge a PR per sprint cycle.
- Review during retrospective how the time to merge can be improved and prioritized.
- Assess the time to merge across sprints to see if the process is improving.
- Ping required approvers directly as a reminder.