Strengthen Your Code Review Skills

Confirming that the code compiles, runs, and has all the semi-colons in the right place is the easy part of code review. The hard part is noticing patterns, noticing what’s missing. You’ve got to figure out how, and how deep, to communicate with the person who wrote the code.

On a given week, I review code for gitlab pipelines and an OpenAPI spec for my direct team, receive merge requests out of the blue on side projects, and review test automation code for many teams across a few departments with varying test strategies and goals.

I’ll tell you about the different expectations for these different contexts, and how I helped set those expectations. I’ll tell you about some tricky situations where I had to reject or completely overhaul a merge request.