Closing the Code Review Gap

Do you ever feel like it takes an eternity for your code to be reviewed, and by the time it does get reviewed the code base has already moved on? Let’s explore how we might narrow that gap.

Raj Nagappan
Level Up Coding
Published in
16 min readApr 1, 2021

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Canyon with shafts of light penetrating to the floor
Sometimes it can feel like there’s a chasm between a code commit and its eventual review | Photo by Madhu Shesharam on Unsplash

One of my frustrations as a developer is waiting for what can seem like forever to get my code reviewed and integrated into the build. I’ve heard many of my colleagues complain about the same issue too. Sometimes we have to chase people to review our code in order to authorize the merge, and other times the roles are reversed and we find ourselves being chased by those same people! Delayed code reviews hold up everything else down the line, such as acceptance testing, deployment and realization of value.

So how could we make code reviews more timely? Let’s look at a few options. But first, let’s start with a couple of assumptions. Let’s assume that these objectives are both good:

  1. Integrating new or revised code into the main line quickly and often.
  2. Preventing code from being integrated into the main line until that new code has been proven itself satisfactory. This would likely include passing both (A) a code review, and (B) automated criteria such as a test suite, code quality analysis, and so on.

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PhD, software engineer, author. Helping teams to craft better products that customers love. Connect at linkedin.com/in/rajnagappan