Many companies today have a formal code review process to prevent engineers from unilaterally merging their changes directly into production. This check exists for a handful of reasons: code maintainability, defect detection, and SOX compliance, to name a few.

If you're on a team with a mandated code review process, part of your job now includes navigating the code review process to get the approvals and feedback you need to ship quickly.
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If you can’t get past the review, you won’t be able to get your code to production (where the impact is).

In this process, you’ll soon discover that not all code reviewers and team cultures around code reviews are created equal.

Today, I want to share the five common types of code reviewers and some strategies you can use to work with each to get your code merged.
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Let's dive in!

Team-Building Exercise

Instead of focusing on the team and how it works together, the Team-Building exercise this week is all about you.
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In particular, what kind of code reviewer are you?
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Do you take too long to review code? Maybe you speed through them faster than you should.
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Perhaps you leave too many or too few comments. Maybe you haven't figured out how to give feedback that lands.
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And a great question to consider: do people enjoy having you review their code? Maybe be bold and ask a teammate their opinion.

Whatever the answers are, think a bit about how you could improve your code review skills and demeanor to help your team ship code more code faster and safer. Pick one goal for yourself in the upcoming iteration and see if you can make some progress.
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Like most things in leadership, you have to go first to create change. Asking others to get to reviewers faster to help your code get merged faster when you put off a review for as long as possible isn't a great posture toward your team.
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Go first and become the reviewer you'd want to have to review your code.

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

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