PR reviews are the best indicator of the health status of a dev team. When there is trust and collegiality, feedback flows naturally and the amount of B.S is low. When the components of the team don't work well together, there's people thinking for 10 minutes how to sugar-coat a comment in a PR or maybe whether they should just ignore it and press that big APPROVE button.
At the same time PRs do break relationships, and this is true because a decent PR often has many hours if not days (if not weeks) of hard work behind them so it is natural for a dev to get attached to their work. When someone contradicts your work, you won't like it.
But what definitely gets people offended (and this is something this article should cover) is having comments about their coding style, rather than the functionality or maybe some edge case / error handling. Unless your project has a clear coding guideline which outlines what is the preferred case, be flexible: your opinion should remain your opinion.
If you want to know how I review my PRs, I divide my comments in 3 categories:
Personal preference: "This is just a personal preference but ..." (e.g variable name, alternative method...)
Minor: "Minor: this method could be broken into 2 submethods to make it more readable. Please consider refactoring it"
Major: "Major: null safety - this could cause an exception if the input is null, please verify the input"
Language is everything. For Personal preference comments I don't ask for anything, for Minor comments I politely ask them to consider it but it's up to them, and for Major comments I am no longer asking: it needs to be resolved prior to approval.
The main idea here is to still provide feedback while letting people deliver and be at home in time for playing with their cats (or whatever it is that they do) :).
I absolutely agree. Breaking up the comments into different categories certainly helps in handling PR reviews. In all cases, attitude is key. If the feedback is positively conveyed, even minor or "personal preference" feedback will be constructive and taken delightedly into account.
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PR reviews are the best indicator of the health status of a dev team. When there is trust and collegiality, feedback flows naturally and the amount of B.S is low. When the components of the team don't work well together, there's people thinking for 10 minutes how to sugar-coat a comment in a PR or maybe whether they should just ignore it and press that big APPROVE button.
At the same time PRs do break relationships, and this is true because a decent PR often has many hours if not days (if not weeks) of hard work behind them so it is natural for a dev to get attached to their work. When someone contradicts your work, you won't like it.
But what definitely gets people offended (and this is something this article should cover) is having comments about their coding style, rather than the functionality or maybe some edge case / error handling. Unless your project has a clear coding guideline which outlines what is the preferred case, be flexible: your opinion should remain your opinion.
If you want to know how I review my PRs, I divide my comments in 3 categories:
Personal preference: "This is just a personal preference but ..." (e.g variable name, alternative method...)
Minor: "Minor: this method could be broken into 2 submethods to make it more readable. Please consider refactoring it"
Major: "Major: null safety - this could cause an exception if the input is null, please verify the input"
Language is everything. For Personal preference comments I don't ask for anything, for Minor comments I politely ask them to consider it but it's up to them, and for Major comments I am no longer asking: it needs to be resolved prior to approval.
The main idea here is to still provide feedback while letting people deliver and be at home in time for playing with their cats (or whatever it is that they do) :).
I absolutely agree. Breaking up the comments into different categories certainly helps in handling PR reviews. In all cases, attitude is key. If the feedback is positively conveyed, even minor or "personal preference" feedback will be constructive and taken delightedly into account.