Apply HN: Spread Code Review Load

2 points by zamalek 10y ago ↗ HN

"1 file code review, 50 comments; 50 file code review, no comments looks good to me." Human nature is causing us to lose focus where focus is needed most.

<Product> takes your code reviews and gives your developers a small portion of them to focus on. If you have 10 developers, give each a single file to vet in your 10 file code review. Context is important, so each developer can still participate in the entire review - they'll just be directed to focus on one part of it. For this reason, files pass a review - it is not a wholesale fail or pass. We'll remember which files passed and let the next round of developers know.

Sometimes you need developers from a specific team to vet changes. Allocate those developers to a team and bring them into the fold for those reviews; spread knowledge by also including developers from other teams.

Got an open source project? Crowd source your reviews and possibly attract contributors by publishing to our hub. We'll match reviewers based on their language and stack experience. We'll still make sure that your developers are involved in every review.

We're going to start off with GitHub, but will be expanding to other platforms in the future - including on-premise platforms such as Perforce and TFS.

Note: I am currently committed to a job. I am leaving this in the open for anyone who would like to pick it up.

2 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 17.6 ms ] thread

angersock 10y ago ↗

If you've ever read The Mythical Man Month, one of the key parts of a software project is coherence of vision.

If everybody is picking at little pieces of code for review at random, that sort of thing is near impossible to achieve.

buss 10y ago ↗

I agree with this sentiment. Large pull requests are large because they have to be. If they're large because you were too lazy to make many PRs, then your process is broken and this won't fix it.

When reviewing a 50+ file PR (that really couldn't be broken up into smaller ones) you really need to keep all of those files in mind while reviewing every part of the PR.