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So I work for a company and whenever we make pull requests our standard protocol is to add the (approximately) 8 developers on the team as reviewers and get approvals from about 7 developers (note that I am a more beginner employee that hasn't even been with the company for a full year yet).

There are a couple problems I have with this

  1. Usually what happens is the devs don't even hardly review the PR's and they just blindly approve them.

  2. Since everyone gets added to every PR, it would take a lot of time to actually do a quality code review for every PR (since we need to review so many PR's).

I personally think it would be better to maybe add all 8 devs but only need approvals from 2 of them. However, it could be required that 1 be from a senior dev who actually understands the code well and does a thorough code review. What do you guys think about this?

Slaknation
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1 Answers1

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You can take a look at other companies to learn what the best practices are for code review process.

For example. At Amazon most code reviews require not one reviewer, some times 2 but mostly not more then that. This is usually The case also at Microsoft.

Requiring 7 approvals indicates you don’t trust each individual approver enough to merge CR he approved. I think this sends bad message to the team.

If you trust member of the team to write code for your system, you should be able to trust him to review his peer code throughly and carefully to validate it.

Moreover, reviewing process is very time consuming and if every PR needs to be reviewed by 8 people this creates too much overhead reviewing work that takes precious developers time.

In some extreme cases where code is changing code functionality or have a high chance of breaking production system I agree 2 or 3 reviews is better then only 1, but for the general case I believe 1 reviewer is enough.

Orr Benyamini
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