Name: What Does A High Trust Team Mean For Code Review?
Uploaded: 2022-04-14T04:55:05+00:00
Duration: 2 min 53 s
Description: In this closing section, we focus on the importance of building and operating within a high-trust engineering team

What Does A High Trust Team Mean For Code Review?

In this closing section, we focus on the importance of **building and operating within a high-trust engineering team**. Trust is not just a feel-good concept—it directly affects our productivity and velocity when shipping code.

- **We prioritize speed and trust in code review.** When we trust our teammates, we don’t block diffs unnecessarily. Instead, we approve with minor suggestions, knowing the author will follow through responsibly.
- **We use “accept with nits” to keep things moving.** For small, straightforward changes—like renaming variables—we leave a “nit” comment but still approve the diff to avoid introducing unnecessary delay.
- **We avoid slowing each other down over trivial issues.** Each extra cycle of “request changes” can delay code by 1–2 days. We conserve team momentum by trusting competent authors to resolve minor feedback themselves.
- **We treat time as our most precious resource.** Code review should add value without becoming a bottleneck. High-trust practices help us operate with both quality and speed.
- **We maintain expectations through communication.** Even when approving with nits, we clarify, *“Please address before landing,”* so everyone stays aligned on expectations without blocking forward motion.

In this closing section, we focus on the importance of building and operating within a high-trust engineering team

[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)