How to Build a Healthy Code Review Culture & Why It Matters?

Code review is one of the most important step in SDLC. It is the process in which the code written by one team member is reviewed by other team members. The main agenda of code review is to identify any bugs or mistakes in the code and to make sure that the newly written code adheres to the internal quality standards.

Beyond finding bugs, code reviews foster better team collaboration & knowledge sharing.

Data-Driven Proof That Good Code Reviews Build Better Teams

1. Improved Code Quality: Studies show that effective code reviews can reduce bugs by up to 80% in production code (link).
2. Enhanced Productivity: Teams with a strong code review culture report a 20-30% increase in overall productivity.
3. Knowledge Sharing: Regular code reviews lead to a 25% improvement in team-wide knowledge distribution.
4. Cost Savings: Early defect detection through code reviews can reduce maintenance costs by up to 50% (link).
5. Employee Satisfaction: Companies with established code review practices report 15% higher employee retention rates.

As you can see above that an effective code review culture doesn’t only improve the over engineering throughput of the team, but also adds to employee satisfaction. I think HRs should help build these cultures to meet their own OKRs :)

Advantages of Building a Healthy Code Review Culture

By now it should have become absolutely clear that healthy code reviews practices should be inculcated in the engineering culture of a company. But, I will still list down some pointers advocating why you should build a positive code review culture.

1. Code Quality Improvement - When you build a collaborative environment for people to come together and try to improve code as a team, then this results in substantial improvement in the quality of code being pushed. In a healthy blameless environment your team can work better, catch bugs early and ensure that the product is reliable and robust.
2. Promotes Knowledge Sharing: Code reviews are the perfect opportunity for peers to share knowledge with each other. In this scenario they should feel very comfortable to have a good conversation and not feel like its something to get over with. When we do code reviews properly, junior engineers learn from the experienced ones and senior learn new techniques and perspectives.
3. Encourages Team Cohesion: You will always find a closely knitted team in a culture where people feel respected and valued. This nonjudgmental approach to feedback encourages open communication and strengthens relationships within the team, leading to improved morale and productivity.
4. Consistent Codebase: In a culture where the guidelines and standards are setup by the team together, you will find a highly consistent codebase. This highly consistent codebase makes it easier for teams to onboard new team members.

Things to do to setup a healthy code review culture

Here are some code review best practices that you can incorporate in your engineering culture to build a healthy code review culture.

1. Setup a culture around code reviews: Code reviews should not be looked upon like something devs have to before handing over the story for testing. You need to make code reviews a part of your engineering culture instead of treating it like a process.
   1. Encourage people when their first PR gets merged, Post it on team’s channel with a congratulatory note.
   2. Encourage people when their long stuck PR gets merged. The ideas here is to eradicate the stigma out of it.
   3. Build an environment where people can feel safe to communicate their opinions and thought process. People should feel comfortable saying the dumbest things and getting clarity from seniors rather than feeling judged.
2. Communication should be improved: In my opinions, communication is one part of engineering culture that is not pressed upon as much as it should. We just assume that people will communicate and deliver the best output. This needs to change and we need to set some clear guidelines on how people are expected to communicate for the betterment of the whole engineering team.
   1. Always use respectful and constructive language. For example say, “This method might be optimized by…” instead of, “You wrote this inefficiently.”
   2. Frame feedback as a suggestions rather than mandates.
   3. Be clear and specific with the feedback. Always back your feedback with a reasoning.
   4. Offer actionable suggestions, such as “Consider renaming this variable for clarity,” rather than vague comments like “This is confusing.”
3. Develop resources to help team: I would recommend every team to create some resources around developer guidelines. This will help keeping the team on track and will help new people joining the team. Have a look at google’s engineering practices documentation.
   1. Document basic coding guidelines. As a company you can establish some guidelines, and teams too should be enabled to have their own guidelines.
4. Leverage Tooling: I would encourage team to leverage tools as much as possible to automate monotonous tasks in SDLC.
   1. Always integrate pre-commit hooks to perform operations like linting and formatting checks.
   2. Integrate tools like SonarQube/Codacy with your CI pipelines. You should make these steps mandatory for the PRs to be enabled for code reviews.
   3. Create a dedicated code review channel for the team to track code review requests. This channel can be used to make sure that all code reviews are done within the agreed upon time. You can leverage tools like Axolo for such a usecase.

So, these are some of the ways in which I try to inculcate a culture of healthy code review within my teams. I will keep on updating this post with my future learnings.