Building Inclusive Code Review Culture

index.md

Thoughts on habits + practices for giving/receiving feedback effectively, as well as creating systems that get better at this with time

Writeups

• Company Blogs
  • Plaid: https://blog.plaid.com/building-an-inclusive-code-review-culture/
  • Vox: https://product.voxmedia.com/2018/8/21/17549400/kindness-and-code-reviews-improving-the-way-we-give-feedback
• Sandya Sankarram
  • https://medium.com/@sandya.sankarram/unlearning-toxic-behaviors-in-a-code-review-culture-b7c295452a3c
• Michael Lynch
  • https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-1/
  • https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-2/
• Erik Uzureau
  • "Writing Code for Code Review" (Forthcoming)
  • Code Review Manifestos at Criteo

Other References

• https://github.com/joho/awesome-code-review

• https://hecate.co/blog/code-review-review-is-the-managers-job

  • May not work in all cultures/teams
  • Interesting appeal to the Andy Grove / High Output Management school of thought

• A code review manifesto: https://github.com/ppseprus/code-review-manifesto

• Internal D&I Code Review Presentation

  • Worked on this Anh-thu Huynh and Christopher Groskopf, see Google Drive

• Managing mindset as a reviewee

  • https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/10-commandments-navigating-code-reviews

• A skit about PR review

  • https://youtu.be/9qYR0NqsDcA?t=33

• 10/28/2019

  • https://github.blog/2015-01-21-how-to-write-the-perfect-pull-request/
    • Has examples for figuring out tone (both in delivering + acknowledging)
    • Defer discussions about styleguide rule to the guidelines repo rather than rehashing it on the specific instance
    • Builds on this piece from thoughtbot

• Giving feedback in general

  • https://fs.blog/2016/02/provide-feedback/

• Flickr Eng Vision doc: https://code.flickr.net/2021/11/22/flickr-engineering-team-vision-guiding-principles/

  • What it Feels Like to Work in a Supportive Environment for Female Engineers
  • Building Better Software by Building Better Teams
  • High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It
  • Psychological Safety, Risk Tolerance and High Functioning Software Teams

Related practices for building inclusive engineering culture

• Pair Programming
• Mentorship, Coaching, and Advocacy
• Better Allies: 5 Ally Actions Newsletter
• On having common mental models for effective problem solving (since code review helps align these)
  • https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/effective-mental-models-for-code-and-systems-7c55918f1b3e

Tooling

• Gitmoji CLI Tools: https://gist.github.com/ericallard0/961c4d109584595594d2baf79d7480e8