As you should know by now, code review is the cornerstone of a successful dev team.
Rapid feedback cycles lead to rapid learning and rapid adaptation. Effective code review is GOLDEN! It keeps everyone’s brains fed :)
But even though it is increadibly important and it should be a high priority for devs, code review is often left until the last possible moment.
There are a few reasons for this. One reason is that learners/students just dont know what “good” looks like. And even if they knew what good looked like, they dont get easy clear access to metrics about their own performance or the performance of their group. They don’t know what we are even measuring or why.
So what we need is a dashboard. Colours, dials, graphs… all that good stuff.
A learner needs to be able to look at their code review dashboard and clearly see if they are doing well or badly, and they need to see how they are doing in comparison to their group.
Basically we keep track of:
We need to be able to show cool visuals that tell a person if they are doing a good job or not.
Here are a few guidelines on what good looks like:
On top of those basics, it’s good to know that staff members have the final say about if a project is competent (or excellent) or not. So another thing we keep track of is disagreements. Eg: if a reviewer says that some code is excellent, then a staff member says it’s a red flag, then it means that the reviewer did a really bad job. Really seriously bad.
So we count “disagreements” and keep track of when they happen, and on what cards/projects.
Why do “disagreement"s happen? There are 2 main reasons:
If a learner gets feedback on one of their projects, it’s their job to react to it quickly and sort things out. A good coder works to get things finished! Responding to feedback as quickly as possible means that learnings can be better applied to future projects.
People who delay on learning from feedback tend to make the same mistakes over and over again and just end up annoying the reviewers.
Acting quickly when someone gives you a thoughtful review is really a good thing to do.
So the things that are worth displaying here are: