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| Section | Stage | Maturity | Last Reviewed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dev | Create | Loveable | 2020-12-15 |
Thanks for visiting this direction page on Code Review in GitLab. This page belongs to the Code Review group of the Create stage and is maintained by Kai Armstrong (E-Mail).
This direction is constantly evolving and everyone can contribute:
Code Review is an essential activity of software development. It ensures that contributions to a project maintain and improve code quality, and is an avenue of mentorship and feedback for engineers. It can also be one of the most time consuming activities in the software development process.
GitLab's guiding principle for Code Review is: Reviewing code is an activity that ultimately improves the resulting product, by improving the quality of the code while optimizing for the speed at which that code is delivered.
The Code Review process begins with authors proposing changes to an existing project via a change proposal. Once they've proposed the changes they need to request feedback from peers (Developers, Designers, Product Managers, etc) and then respond to that feedback. Ultimately, a merge request needs to be approved and then merged for the Code Review process to be completed for a given changeset.
When an author submits their merge request, the first step is to find an appropriate person to review the changes. As an author, it can be hard to determine who might have subject matter expertise in an area, who has available capacity, and, ultimately, who needs to approve your Merge Request. If the wrong person is selected for a review, the quality of the review and the speed at which that review is completed are impacted.
When an author finds the right reviewer, it's important that the reviewer is able to easily understand the context of the changes, and provide constructive and meaningful feedback to the author. The feedback a reviewer provides should provide clear intention and actionable comments which are devoid of undocumented opinion.
Merge request reviewers also need to transparently communicate status of the review at all points in time. This includes communicating to themselves which changes have been reviewed and where in the process they are. They also need to be able to communicate this to the change author so that they understand when they need to action feedback. Finally, status needs to be communicated to other reviewers and interested parties so that the contribution is delivered efficiently.
After feedback has been provided through the merge request, the author must respond to that feedback and signal to reviewers that it has been actioned either via additional changes or comments. Authors also need to address feedback provided by automated testing, security scanning and quality review tools as part of their contribution.
As a final piece of the review cycle, the merge request needs to be approved. This is an important affirmative signal that the contribution meets the standards of the project and is an improvement to the codebase. In some cases, initial reviewers provide that approval which is why selecting the correct reviewer is so important. In cases where there are second level approvals required, surfacing that information to authors and suggesting appropriate approvers can ensure contributions don't sit stale.
GitLab's vision for code review is a place where:
In GitLab, Code Review takes place in the Merge Request. GitLab should make these tasks efficient and easy, so that velocity and code quality both increase even if the merge request isn't perfect.
The primary metric by which we measure the success of the Code Review category is: reducing the duration of the Code Review. This is measured as the duration from the first merge request version to merged.
Category-level UX baselines conducted quarterly will provide qualitative feedback to validate perceived efficiency and our hypothesis.
Code review is used by software engineers and individual contributors of all kinds. Depending on their context, however, the workflow and experience of code review can vary significantly.
There are many code review tools in the market as well as multiple workflows. Deciding which features/workflows to build-in to GitLab is important so that users can migrate seamlessly. However, it is not realistic for us to support every feature/workflow out there, as such we must suss out the most popular, forward-looking features/workflows, and support them in GitLab.
Some of the features/workflows we are planning to build into GitLab:
Some of the features/workflows we are currently researching:
The code review process involves at least two roles (author, and reviewer) but may involve many people, who work together to achieve code quality standards and mentor the author. Furthermore, many reviewers are often not Developers. Reviewers may be Developers, UX Designers, Product Managers, Technical Writers, Security Engineers and more.
In support of GitLab's vision for code review, areas of interest and improvement can be organized by the following goals:
The following improvements will help us make significant progress towards the above goals:
In Progress: Smarter merge request diffs using merge refs
Code reviews are time consuming, requiring engineers to carefully review and understand the proposed change. The accuracy of the diff is therefore critical.
Additionally, both Atlassian and GitHub have made their diffs smarter, showing the actual difference between the source and target branch, not the source branch and the merge base of the target branch.
In progress: Comment on multiple lines
Feedback doesn't always relate to a single line, and it can be restrictive to be unable to comment on a range of lines. Similarly, suggested changes to merge requests can also span multiple lines in a diff, but it is difficult to use this feature without a natural interface to select multiple lines.
Next: Merge Request Reviewer Handoff
Merge Request Reviewers allow users to explicitly ask people for a review of their contribution. However, when that user has finished the review, there is no clear signal to the author of the merge request (absent an approval.) There's also not a clear signal to the reviewer that the author has addressed their feedback and a new review is needed before the contribution can be accepted.
Simplifying the handoff process and communicating whose responsibility it is to take action on a given Merge Request will help to accelerate cycle time and eliminate time spent waiting.
Next: 👀 Track unread files in merge requests
Large code reviews involving multiple files and lots of code require reviewers accurately keep track of the files/code that has already been reviewed in order to avoid duplicate effort.
Helping reviewers keep track of the files/code that has already been reviewed will save time, eliminate duplication of work, and yield better code reviews.
This category is currently at the Loveable maturity level (see our definitions of maturity levels).
GitLab competes with both integrated and dedicated code review tools. Because merge requests (which is the code review interface), and more specifically the merge widget, is the single source of truth about a code change and a critical control point in the GitLab workflow, it is important that merge requests and code review in GitLab is excellent. Our primary source of competition and comparison is to dedicated code review tools.
Prospects and new customers, who previously used dedicated code review tools typically have high expectations and accustomed to a high degree of product depth. Given that developers spend a significant portion (majority?) of their in application time in merge requests, limitations are quickly noticed and become a source of frustration.
GitLab’s current code review experience is largely modeled after GitHub’s, with most of its pros and cons. Gerrit and Phabricator are frequently mentioned as the best alternatives to the GitHub code review model. See the competitive analysis for a closer look at the user experience and feature set of competitor tools.
Integrated code review packaged with source code management:
Dedicated code review tools:
IDE-related:
The highest priority customer requests are for improved application performance, accuracy and efficiency for reviewing merge request diffs of all sizes, small and extremely large.
Other notable requests include:
Investigating: Commit focused code review
Small changes are easier and faster to review, and commits are the smallest unit of change. Some of the largest projects in the world use commit based workflows for this reason.
We are investigating how we can amplify best practices in commit focussed workflows, and bring these into GitLab to improve code quality and efficiency.
Investigating: Track unread merge request comments and commits
When reviewing a merge request with multiple commits, a large number of changes, or that requires many revisions, it's hard to know what requires your attention, and what you have previously reviewed. This is a factor in making code review inefficient.
