Short feedback loops are one of the drivers of productivity according to the DevEx model. On my team at Trello, we had a goal of all reviews being done inside 24 hours. Having that goal drove behaviors that made most reviews complete in a few hours. So, to start, collect data and get on the same page.
If your reviews are taking too long, try these enabling steps first:
- Gather metrics: If you use GitHub, try this repository metrics script to get a baseline.
- Get consensus: Nothing will happen unless the whole team is on board with this being a problem and that it can be fixed.
- Set a goal: I know from experience that 100% of reviews in less than 24 (work) hours is possible. If that seems out of reach, set something that you could accomplish in a quarter.
- Inspect outliers: Treat outliers like you would treat an outage incident.
- Compare reviews that met the goal to ones that didn’t: Gather statistics about PR’s and see if you can find differences between the ones that did and didn’t. For example: number of lines changed, the author, the reviewer, the number of commits, the part of the codebase, etc.
- Put real-time monitoring in place: If you are the lead, just do this manually to start. At the beginning of the day, make sure all of yesterday’s PRs are going to be reviewed soon.
Tomorrow, I’ll write about some common problems and what to do about them.