Hello all. I work on a small team and I’ve been tasked with taking on the bulk of code review for when my senior goes on leave. Although I’ve read a fair bit of code (man am I lucky I learned to code before AI “got good”) I can’t say I’ve done a lot of actual “review”. Does anyone have any tips? I feel responsible if anything breaks after I review it so of course I want to avoid that.
Always phrase things in a positive way. No matter how good or thorough your review is, phrasing issues in a positive way and pointing out good things will make discussion about the code so much easier, and also obviously make the human interaction at work nicer.
Also there may be novice people or people who just didn’t do a very good job with their pull requests. Don’t judge. Remember that you are not grading an exam, but reviewing is a cooperative task.
“This is great, this is ok, this is great.” is an amazing tool. People will always focus on the negative, so presenting a negative as a positive, but juxtaposed with even better positives, shifts the scale. It makes people think about it, without being too hard on themselves. I call it the compliment sandwich.
Another tip that has served me well is the tick of approval, followed by the question “With this part, what would you do differently next time?”. It frames it as self improvement feedback.
That being said, I’m not part of a traditional code review process, so this could all be totally misguided advice.
Wish someone had given me this advice when I was younger!