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Dan Goslen | The Team-Driven Developer

Avoid Making Enemies During Code Reviews

Published 4 months ago • 2 min read

Team-Driven Developer

A newsletter with tips and tools for building software as a team

đź‘‹ Welcome to all the new members of the newsletter! Glad you are here.

As I’ve shared, I’m a big fan of code reviews and their benefits. Code reviews are an important part of the software lifecycle, both automated and person-to-person.

They can help spread knowledge, act as a conduit for mentoring, find bugs before they make it to production, etc.

Unfortunately, code reviews also have a tendency to start conflicts and create enemies.

While some conflict can be healthy, when two developers begin to “go at it” in a review, you lose all of the benefits of the review.

Repeat: all the benefits of a code review will be lost if trust and safety are lost along the way (whether you are the reviewer or the author).

When those two things are lost, Google research says teams just won’t perform well.

What can we do to help prevent conflicts from escalating into long-drawn-out hostility and animosity?

Team-Building Exercise

This week's Team-Building Exercise is about looking for ways that you can practice humility in your code reviews.
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For instance

  • Are there certain team members you tend to resist feedback from? Try to understand why and see if there are things you could learn from them that you've been missing out on
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  • Are you too quick to judge someone's code without asking questions? Are you rushing through code reviews and not taking the proper time to read and reason through them? Try to slow down and give the review the right amount of time (which is giving the author your time as well)
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  • Are there other team dynamics at play, making it difficult for you to give or receive feedback with humility? Perhaps you are the lead on a project, and without meaning to, you are overly critical of changes in an effort to have a high-quality release (been there!).

Whatever the issue is, I've found that in many areas, frustration over code reviews or other team dynamics often has an anchor in a lack of trust, respect, and humility.

If you want more on staying humble and building trust and respect, take a look at Debugging Teams! It's a book by some really smart and seasoned engineers about creating a high-performing software team (which is what this newsletter is all about).

Here are some more resources from me to help you build better teams!​

  • đź“• Code Review Champion - My book on code reviews will help you become a world-class code reviewer. From giving kind feedback to navigating conflict, this book can help anyone wanting to sharpen their code review skills.
  • ❓​Questions for Devs - Building a team takes more than catching up about your weekend at standup. I've used these questions to build relationships with my team and push past the same old surface-level conversations.
  • ​📋 Pull Request Template - Maximize your efforts in pull requests by giving context right at the beginning of a new pull request. Copy and paste this template into your repo, and voilĂ !
  • đź“Š ​Code Review Metrics - Start measuring how your team tracks against a few common code review metrics. This python script will pull your GitHub pull requests and generate a CSV you can slice-n-dice to get the data you want. It also has graphs! As this is an open-source project, your contributions and feedback would be great!
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Dan Goslen | The Team-Driven Developer

Helping software engineers build better teams

Learn the tips and tools for building software as a team! Every other week, I send a long-form article, a team-building exercise, and resources to help you build better software teams so you can build better software.

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