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Code Review Anxiety

Code Review Anxiety

What can devs do about code review anxiety?

I listened to this Stack Overflow podcast with Carol Lee PhD. Being a PhD, she’s written a research paper:

Anxiety about giving and receiving code reviews has been documented as a common occurrence that leads to developers avoiding code reviews by procrastinating and limiting their cognitive engagement with them

There’s some great material linked to that:

And some more free training that seems to be linked to Pluralsight:

TL;DR: anxiety leads to avoidance - there are workshops that can help

How to review code effectively: A GitHub staff engineer’s philosophy

A perspective from a GitHub staff engineer on how to use the GitHub tooling to help find code to review, and how to give good code reviews.

Some final points:

  • To approve or not
  • Review your own code
  • Be welcoming of post-merge reviews
  • Use draft pull requests
  • Be gracious
This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.