Why Truly Great Product Managers Love Code Review

Many years ago, I started my career in product management with only a basic understanding of what is code review—developers looking through each others' code for bugs. With upcoming deadlines, KPIs, user (re)engagement, compliance, and revenue goals all competing for my attention, understanding our development team’s code review process wasn’t a priority. After all, we had a great QA team. It took some time for me to understand that code review is so much more than identifying new issues.

By Dan Mateer

Code Reviewer Spotlight: Tristan Dunn

With experience scaling development teams at companies like Clearbit, Envoy, ROLI, Dribbble, and Google, PullRequest reviewer Tristan Dunn’s resume spans many different creative industries. Looking across them all and his work with PullRequest, he sees how new hires or new developers provide a fresh perspective through code review, and how sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed to find code smells that teams may have become nose blind to.

By Brennan Angel

Code Reviewer Spotlight: Fahad Zafar

Before working at Google and Amazon, Fahad Zafar points to code review from senior software engineers as the key tool that helped him grow as a developer. Now, as one of the thousands of reviewers at PullRequest, Fahad seeks to pay it forward by helping development teams improve code quality through code review.

While PullRequest reviewers come from diverse backgrounds, some common themes across reviewers include a passion for improving code quality, and a strong desire to help developers build better software. We interviewed our top reviewers and asked them the following seven questions:

By Brennan Angel

Code Reviewer Spotlight: Dylan Drop

A good code review process can be the fastest feedback loop for developers to receive actionable feedback from senior software engineers. PullRequest reviewer Dylan Drop also sees code review through the lens of mentorship, and emphasizes that developers and reviewers share a common goal of delivering high-quality code.

Our Code Reviewer Spotlight is an ongoing series of interviews so you can get to know our top reviewers. Learn more about Dylan’s drive for continuous learning through code review below:

By Brennan Angel

5 Steps to Create an Effective Code Review Culture

Anyone on a development team who contributes to a software project expects some sort of a code review process. The vast majority of engineering leads will tell you code review is important. The team will have a code review process set up that everyone is encouraged or required to follow.

The only problem? You’re more likely to get the standard “Looks good to me!” (a.k.a. “lgtm”) and approval, without any substantive feedback. It’s a missed opportunity for you to learn from others and to improve your code. The team also misses out on the many ways code review makes your dev team better.

By Brennan Angel