Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rcxdude 545 days ago
I'm all for low-latency reviews, but this target seems crazy: a perfect recipe for a lot of apparent activity for little actual progress. Maybe it depends on the project, but for a lot of projects 15 minutes of review time means you basically are only going to accept trivial changes.
2 comments

As it turns out, most of the work that most developers do is updating or enhancing CRUD apps. There's already a plan and an intent that just needs to be typed out.

I've found 15-30 minutes to be plenty of time to review about a day's worth of code. It's enough time to process what the code is doing and iterate over the tests, in general.

Here's a scary thought: if something small takes 15-30 minutes to appropriately process ... how much longer do *large* changes take? Can someone keep all that in their mind that whole time to comprehend and process a huge change?

And a better question, will they?

> 15 minutes of review time means you basically are only going to accept trivial changes.

Um, yes. This is 100% the point. There is no amount of refactoring, bug fixing, or features that cannot be expressed as a chain of trivial changes.

What you usually see happen is that instead of spending a week experimenting with 15 different refactors, is that an engineer opens a PR with what they think they're going to try first. Other engineers point out how they had tried that before and it didn't work; but maybe this other way will. So, they end up "working together" on the refactor instead of one developer getting lost in the sauce for a week seeing what sticks to a wall.

In essence, about the same amount of time is spent; but the code is higher quality and no architecture reviews during code reviews (which is another rule that should exist on a team -- architecture reviews should happen before a single line of code is touched).