As a dev just a year out of college, it is easy to tell myself I’m not qualified to review a senior dev’s pull request (PR). Reviewing pull reques

Review Pull Requests Confidently

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2022-09-22 15:00:25

As a dev just a year out of college, it is easy to tell myself I’m not qualified to review a senior dev’s pull request (PR). Reviewing pull requests, however, is a great way for a new dev to learn best practices and the codebase. After discussing this feeling with my manager, Joe Chrysler, he encouraged me to tackle this feeling head-on and get to the bottom of it. With his help, I realized I needed a process for reviewing a pull request that allowed me to feel confident giving it my stamp of approval. Ultimately, this took the form of a checklist run-through for every PR I review.

Read through the story that the code is addressing. Great! Now do it again. Make sure you fully understand the requirements of the feature so you can tell whether the code solves the right problem. It’s easy to miss details when you’re in a rush. Checking the feature outline before you start reviewing is a great way to combat this.

Pull the code and run it locally. Test the feature requirements on your machine so you feel confident it’s solving the problem. Sometimes it is easy to look through a smaller PR and approve it without doing this step because it seems like a hassle. However, this is an essential step in PR reviewing. It’s never fun when you merge something to dev and are surprised to see it’s not working.

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