Name: Code Review MUST Be Fast, Otherwise The Team Is Unhealthy
Uploaded: 2022-04-14T04:54:31+00:00
Duration: 4 min 10 s
Description: In this final segment of the video, the speakers reflect on the crucial role that code review turnaround time plays in e

Code Review MUST Be Fast, Otherwise The Team Is Unhealthy

In this final segment of the video, the speakers reflect on the crucial role that **code review turnaround time** plays in engineering culture, team productivity, and developer happiness. Timely reviews are not just a technical necessity—they reflect the team’s values and operational discipline.

- **We treat code review turnaround time seriously.** Our standard should be to review diffs within *one day*, two at most. Slow feedback cycles—especially taking 4–5 days—compound and slow down overall delivery velocity.
- **We recognize code review as a gatekeeper with real power.** Since all production code must pass through this step, bottlenecks here can deeply affect morale, productivity, and team trust.
- **We advocate for clear team expectations.** When reviews consistently lag, we push for a shared SLA (Service Level Agreement) around review times, ensuring accountability and smoother planning.
- **We balance urgency with respect.** While prompt reviews are key, we also avoid pestering reviewers within minutes of submitting. Giving at least 6 hours (unless it’s urgent) is a sign of maturity and respect.
- **We proactively build good habits.** Many of us block time at the end of our day to batch and respond to review requests, which helps us maintain velocity without excessive context-switching.

In this final segment of the video, the speakers reflect on the crucial role that code review turnaround time plays in e

[Masterclass] How To Do Amazing Code Review

Code review is one of the most effective ways to learn as a software engineer, especially for those earlier-in-career. Unfortunately, way too many engineering teams get it wrong with slow review speed and low quality comments.

There is a mountain of information in this presentation, so here's our 5 favorite points (in no particular order):
- **Code review is NOT for catching bugs** - Of course, if you find a bug in a PR (pull request), you should call it out, but that's not the primary purpose of code review. The core benefit of code review is to build up engineering culture, propagating best practices amongst the team and growing newer and more junior engineers.
- **Add deep context to your PRs** - Explain what your pull request does and the reasoning behind your approach. Also, *include a test plan.* A test plan is a demo showcasing what your code changes do; try to make it a video/gif, which is especially powerful if you work on front-end (Android/iOS/web). If you can't do a video, try attaching a screenshot or a set of commands to run tests.
- **One diff, one thesis** - Every PR should be focused and atomic: Don't jam the entire new feature you just coded up in a single 1,000+ line PR. Huge commits are hard to review, and your teammates will hate you for it. For the vast majority of cases, you can break down your PRs to 25-250 lines of code.
- **Read others' code reviews** - Similar to so many other things in tech, stand on the shoulders of giants where you can. With code review, this means looking at how senior+ engineers on your team comment on reviews. Try to find patterns in the issues they're finding and incorporate it into how you review code. Revisions that have been rejected with changes requested are a gold mine for this learning.
- **Code review MUST be fast** - When we say fast, we mean that feedback should arrive in <24 hours. What a lot of engineers don't realize is that code review delay is multiplicative: Sometimes commit will need 3-5 revisions before they're able to be merged. If turnaround is 2+ days, this can easily lead to commits taking weeks to land, which is far too slow.

A lot of the terminology in this video is Meta specific. If you're more used to GitHub:
- Diff review = Pull request
- Diff = Commit

Related resources:
- ["How to give better code reviews without full business context?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/vio35mw1SYWM8AYojB2w/how-to-give-better-code-reviews-without-full-business-context/)
- ["How to review code in another language/ from another team?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/B79W3aWc8xMB8cCULFdJ/how-to-review-code-in-another-language-from-another-team/)
- [Presentation Slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1koyIR9K_CtESD7Vnh3GQOE-svFW-ngrQeEAduSAoH0w/edit)