A practical guide to modern code review—from reducing friction to building team culture. Tips for writers, reviewers, and leads to turn code review into a source of clarity, speed, and collaboration instead of delay and frustration.
Code review is a key driver of team productivity. It is where quality is shaped, knowledge is exchanged, and team culture takes root. For many engineering teams, the review stage is more than a checkpoint. It is the main operation theater where ideas are tested, standards are reinforced, and collective ownership is built.
This article takes a perspective on code review shaped by the experience of thousands of reviews, passionate discussions with talented engineers, and learnings from leading tech company blogs and publications. You can use it as a toolbox to introduce specific practices in your own team, or as a starting point for rethinking and evolving your processes.
Attached to each section, you will find practical advice tailored to different roles:
Code Writer/Reviewer: any role that involves opening and/or reviewing pull requests.
Facilitator: any role that can influence the process in your context, such as a CTO, manager, staff engineer, or any individual contributor with the latitude to make changes happen.
The Role of Code Review
In modern software teams, code review is more than quality control. It is a shared safety net. A well-run process catches defects early, ensures architectural decisions are not made in isolation, and helps establish a common mental model of the system so that knowledge does not remain locked inside one person's head.
All review discussions are saved in the pull request and accessible through the Git history. This means any software contributor can revisit them later to understand why a choice was made. That historical context becomes valuable when debugging, onboarding new team members, or revisiting design decisions months or years later.
It also reinforces a culture of collective ownership. When several people have read and discussed a piece of code, it no longer belongs to just the author. It belongs to the team, and that shared responsibility is a subtle but powerful driver of productivity.
Tips for Code Writers
Help your reviewers help you. Start by being the first reviewer of your own work. Read through your changes as if you were seeing them for the first time and catch anything you can before involving others. Keep your pull request in draft until it is sharp, the CI has passed, and it is truly ready for review.
Write a complete and clear description that explains the problem, the solution, and any trade-offs you made. Do not assume reviewers will remember the full context from past conversations. Open targeted comments in your own PR to highlight lines where you had doubts, to ask for specific opinions, or to explain why you chose one approach over another. This makes the review faster, more focused, and more useful.
Keep your PR as small as possible and separate concerns in commits with relevant names. Ideally, aim for no more than 200 additions and 200 deletions (do not take this as a strict limit; context matters, the real goal is to respect the cognitive load of the reviewer). If the change is larger, break it into smaller PRs. When you have multiple PRs that build on each other, link them in the description so reviewers can follow the sequence and understand dependencies.
Tips for Code Reviewers
Treat every review as both a quality check and a learning opportunity. Use it to understand technical and functional choices, not just to hunt for mistakes. If something is unclear, pull the branch, run the code, and explore it in context. Seeing the change in action often reveals insights that are hard to catch from a diff alone.
Be conscious of the scope. Avoid turning the review into a design overhaul unless the change truly warrants it. When deciding whether to approve, the question is not “is the PR perfect” or “would I have done it this way,” but “is the codebase better after merging than before?” If the answer is yes and minor tweaks remain, approve it and open follow-up work later. This keeps delivery moving and prevents authors from being blocked unnecessarily.
Tips for Both Writers & Reviewers
It is time to switch to a synchronous conversation if a discussion needs more than three back-and-forth exchanges in comments without building a clear direction. Share a coffee, jump on a quick call, or sit together for a few minutes. Complex topics are often resolved faster and with less frustration in real-time discussion.
Tips for Facilitators
Provide clear review guidelines and make sure the team knows what is expected from both authors and reviewers. Organize live review sessions where the team walks through a PR together to share good practices and demonstrate the expected behavior. Regularly browse recent PRs to understand the team’s review dynamics, spot bottlenecks, and identify where coaching may help.
The Human Side of Code Review
Code review is a technical process, but its impact on the team is deeply human. A well-run review builds trust, reinforces shared standards, and creates a safe space to ask questions. A poorly handled one can damage morale, fuel frustration, and make people hesitant to contribute.
The tone of a review matters as much as its content. A comment pointing out a bug can be constructive or demoralizing, depending on how it is phrased. Reviews are also one of the best opportunities for knowledge transfer, both technical and functional, across a team. Seeing how others approach a problem, structure code, or document their reasoning is an ongoing form of mentorship.
A healthy review culture means separating the person from the code. Disagree with the implementation, not the individual. It means asking clarifying questions instead of making assumptions. It also means recognizing good work openly, not just pointing out flaws.
Tips for Code Writers
Do not take feedback as a personal attack. If a comment feels off, ask for clarification instead of reacting defensively. Use the review as a way to explain your decisions and share what you have learned while implementing the change.
Tips for Code Reviewers
Your job is to improve the codebase, not win an argument. Phrase suggestions in ways that invite discussion. Highlight what was done well, not just what needs changing. And why not make it fun, add a light comment or a bit of encouragement when appropriate. A review that makes someone smile is a better way to ensure good practices are remembered than a pull request filled with friction.
Small challenge for you in your next review:
Start by reading the tests to understand the functional intent before diving into the internal mechanics.
Try not to use "I" at all.
Turn all your comments into questions.
Include at least one positive comment.
Tips for Facilitators
Lead by example. Provide training or workshops on how to give and receive feedback effectively. Watch for patterns where reviews cause friction and address them early. Celebrate examples of great reviews so the team sees what good looks like in practice.
When the Flow Stalls
A stalled review process is easy to spot: PRs pile up, context switches multiply, and merge conflicts start to appear in places that were clean last week. The delivery pipeline slows down even if the rest of the process is working well.
The causes vary. Sometimes, reviewers are overloaded and cannot pick up new PRs promptly. Other times, the PRs themselves are intimidating in size or scope, making them harder to approach. Lack of clear ownership can also be a culprit. When it is unclear who should review, everyone assumes someone else will do it. In some cases, reviews get stuck in "ping-pong mode," with a series of back-and-forth nitpicks that add little real value.
When the flow stalls, the impact spreads. Developers spend more time resolving merge conflicts and reloading context for work they finished days ago. Features wait longer to reach users, creating pressure elsewhere in the process. Morale drops as contributors feel blocked and powerless to move forward.
Tips for Code Writers
If your PR has been sitting without progress, speak out. Ask for a synchronous discussion to resolve blocking points and prevent delays. Do not let it stagnate while you move on to other tasks, address it before the backlog of pending work grows.
Tips for Code Reviewers
Prioritize older PRs over newly opened ones. Clearing the backlog keeps work moving and prevents the accumulation of stale, harder-to-merge changes.
Tips for Facilitator
Make stalled PRs visible in team channels or dashboards so they are easy to spot. Encourage team members to pick up reviews when they have spare capacity, even if it is outside their usual area, to help keep work moving. Periodically review the causes of stalled PRs: oversized changes, unclear expectations, or prolonged back-and-forth and address them in team discussions or process refinements.
Shaping Your Code Review Workflow
There is no single "best" review workflow. Each team has its own dynamic, shaped by size, skills, priorities, and personalities. What works well for one team may be inefficient for another. And as the team grows or changes, the workflow that felt perfect last year might start creating bottlenecks. Regularly revisit how you handle reviews to make sure the process still matches the reality of the team.
One area where workflows differ a lot is in how review requests are delivered. In broad terms, there are two approaches: push and pull.
In a push setup, review requests are actively sent to developers. You get a notification (e.g., Slack) or a direct assignment telling you the PR is waiting for you. In a pull setup, you are responsible for checking the review queue or dashboard and picking up the PRs assigned to you or available to the team.
Pull flows are better at avoiding context switching and give reviewers more control over when they work on reviews. However, they rely on consistent engagement from every team member to work well. In practice, that level of discipline is rare, and uneven participation can lead to workload disparities that create frustration.
The best solution for most teams is a mix of both. Let engineers decide when to pull reviews while keeping a channel or tool to push pending reviews. Use push sparingly for emergencies, with the understanding that emergencies should be the exception, not the norm.
Code review is a core part of a software engineer's work and deserves a structured place in personal organization. Some engineers block dedicated calendar slots. My approach is lighter: I follow a daily routine built on GitHub pull-request search syntax to cover the most common review tasks.
With the GitHub Pull Request extension for Visual Studio Code, I can jump seamlessly from one PR to another. This routine fits naturally between meetings, design discussions, and new tasks.
Tips for Code Writer
Make urgency visible. If your change is blocking or time-sensitive, label it clearly and add the reason in the PR description. This helps reviewers prioritise without guessing.
Tips for Code Reviewers
Find a routine that fits your way of working and your company's context, balancing the time you spend on your own tasks and priorities with enabling your coworkers to move forward.
Tips for Facilitators
Make it clear what a "normal" review delay is, so expectations are shared. Create opportunities for engineers to discuss their personal workflows and exchange tips on how to keep reviews moving.
When Review Happens in Real Time
Pair programming is the most direct way to integrate review into the development process. Two engineers work on the same piece of code simultaneously, discussing decisions as they go. By the time the change is committed, it has already been reviewed, clarified, and agreed upon.
This approach eliminates the waiting time between coding and review. It also reduces the risk of misunderstandings, because questions are resolved immediately instead of being left in a comment thread. For complex changes, pairing can help surface edge cases or design flaws that might take days to uncover in an asynchronous review.
When the change is low risk, the approval from the pair programmer can be enough to merge, covering most PRs without needing additional reviewers. Pairing does not remove the option of adding more reviewers if the situation calls for it. Even when a second review is required, pairing significantly reduces the back and forth because many questions and issues have already been discussed and resolved.
Pair programming is not a silver bullet. It can double the engineering hours spent on a task if the scope does not justify it. It requires compatible working styles and a clear understanding of roles during the session.
Tips for Code Writers
Approach pairing as collaboration, not as an exam. Ask questions, explore alternatives, and focus on understanding the problem space together, taking it as an opportunity to build a solid relationship with your coworker, share practices, and align approaches.
Tips for Facilitators
Encourage pairing for scenarios where it makes the most impact: onboarding, complex refactoring, or areas with frequent bugs. Make sure pairing is voluntary and balanced so it does not become an unplanned drain on productivity. Share positive examples to build trust in the practice.
Where Code Review Meets DORA
The DORA metrics are a widely used framework for assessing engineering performance (see full guide here). Code review has a direct impact on several of them, especially Change Lead Time and Change Failure Rate.
Change Lead Time measures how long it takes for code to go from commit to production. Review time is a significant portion of that journey. If PRs wait too long for feedback or bounce back and forth through multiple cycles, the metric will rise even if the rest of your delivery pipeline is efficient.
Change Failure Rate measures the percentage of deployments that cause issues requiring a fix or rollback. Review quality influences this directly: well-executed reviews catch design flaws and implementation mistakes that could otherwise slip into production.
To understand where review affects these metrics, it helps to break down review time into parts:
Time from PR creation to first reviewer comment
Time from first comment to decision (approval or request for changes)
Number of review cycles between request and approval
This breakdown is enough to reveal patterns. A high delay before the first comment may indicate a pickup problem, while long cycles after the first comment often point to unclear feedback, lack of shared context, or oversized PRs.
Tips for Facilitators
Monitor review timelines across the team and share trends during retrospectives. If delays cluster in one stage, adjust the workflow or staffing to address it. Keep an eye on the balance between review speed and review depth, making sure you are not trading shorter review times for a higher failure rate later. Use anonymized examples to illustrate the impact of review delays on Change Lead Time and encourage collective ownership of the process.
AI in Code Review: Reality Check
It is possible that in a few years, AI will automate so much of software engineering that human code review will disappear entirely. If AI can design, write, test, and deploy with more context than a human team, the PR process as we know it will be obsolete.
That is not the world we live in today. In 2025, AI review tools will still be unreliable for anything beyond mechanical checks. Tools like GitHub Copilot can generate summaries, point out formatting issues, or flag suspicious patterns, but they often miss essential context or produce irrelevant suggestions. If you have tried Copilot in review, you know the results can range from occasionally useful to completely off target.
That being said, it is worth keeping the door open. These tools evolve quickly, and what feels underwhelming today could become genuinely valuable in the near future. AI's role in code review does not have to stop at built-in features. It can also be used to support your process, using the diff and a well-designed prompt to set labels, suggest the most relevant reviewers, or perform custom checks before a human ever opens the PR.
Tips for Code Writers
Do not wait for the review to get AI feedback. Use it beforehand to challenge your code and the choices you made. Stay accountable and never commit something you do not fully understand just because an AI suggested it.
Tips for Facilitators
Help your team use these tools efficiently. Encourage those who benefit the most from them to share workflows and examples so others can learn to extract value without wasting time. Explore other AI applications to solve any issue you have identified, and encourage your team to use these tools to address the challenges they face.
Final Thoughts
Code review sits at the crossroads of technical and human challenges, and its impact on your team's productivity should not be underestimated. The perfect approach will always depend on your company's context and team dynamics, but one principle holds everywhere: lead by example. Give the kind of review you would like to receive, and use it as a chance to start conversations with your pair. When the process works well, code review shifts from being a source of frustration or a productivity blocker to becoming a powerful driver of knowledge sharing and team cohesion. If even a single idea from this article can help you move in that direction, put it into action.
