A Survey of Code Review Guidelines

How Google, New Relic, Palantir and Yelp manage their code review process.

A lot has been said about the reasons to perform code reviews as part of the software development life cycle, their benefits, and how effective this practice can be in detecting and preventing deficiencies from being introduced into production code.

Since you are reading this, you are probably already convinced that this is a must-have practice that should be part of a healthy process in our engineering organizations. However, if done incorrectly, code reviews can be a source of frustration, conflict and wasted time and effort.

Many of the barriers to successful and effective review programs are social and cultural in nature instead of technical. So, the question becomes about how to guide humans into an effective way to communicate feedback to one another about their code. …