Amazing Code Reviews: Creating a Superhero Collective

GOTO Berlin 2019

Are you a bit terrified when merging to master? Do you loathe having to read hundreds of LOC to understand that PR you got tagged in? Do you polish and re-polish before asking for a review? Then you should come to my talk. We’ll talk about how your team can be awesome at reviewing code.

There is general consensus on the fact that code reviews are an important step for a successful development workflow. Most organizations undergo code reviews of some form.

However, it’s all too common to see reviewers that barely scratch the surface of the work being put forth, or that offer feedback that is unclear or hard to act upon. This robs the team from the opportunity to speed up learning, share knowledge and context, and from generally raising the quality bar on the software being built.

In this talk, I will share my story of encountering a new code review process when joining Shopify, and the surprising learnings I found - even as an experienced developer. I will discuss the tremendous gains individuals and teams can reap from a thoughtful, well structured review process. I will also share some practical techniques we use to help both the reviewers and the reviewees do a fantastic job at crafting solid deliverables.

What will the audience learn from this talk?
Attendees will take home a set of principles and pragmatic techniques for improving their Code Reviews and raising the quality bar on their organization.

Does it feature code examples and/or live coding?
There will be plenty of code samples, but no live coding.

Prerequisite attendee experience level:
Level 200