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Andrey Bodoev for MyCareersFuture

Posted on • Edited on

Code Review: Prereview checklist. No important tasks are forgotten.

Here's my rephrase on preflight checklist,

a prereview checklist is a list of tasks that should be performed by developer or team prior to raise an Merge Request 

Everytime we discussing changes in code review, we might found ourself talking about same things over and over again. For example, asking in comments to add testing instructions or adding pivotal story number for reference. 

To prevent that we need a little reminder to ourselves, or list of things we should check before raising an attention to your changes.

In our team we have checklists built-in in our Merge Request templates.

Here an example of one of our templates,

<!-- Make sure Merge Request title following "<type>: <subject> [#<pivotal_story_id>]" -->

<!-- Brief description. Examples are, screenshots, steps to reproduce, links to dependent MRs -->

### General Checklist:

- [ ] Exact versions in package.json
- [ ] Testing instructions?
- [ ] Docs? Examples are, update `README.md` file, or add ADR in `doc/adr`
- [ ] Tests?
- [ ] Put in copy at least two potential reviewers

/cc

/label ~"Review Me"
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Structure of this template are self-explanatory, one thing I want to point out is last line: /label ~"Review Me" on which I already wrote an article.

And don't forget to treat checklists as living documentation, new items can be added, or removed throughout time.

It's purpose is to improve code review safety by ensuring that no important tasks are forgotten.

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