You want to give someone feedback in code review, but you know text is so hard to get right. It’s misinterpreted all the time.
You don’t want your message to come across the wrong way. You want the other person to be open to your suggestion and see your point of view.
This is surprisingly hard to get right!
In the past, I gave feedback which slowly built tension throughout the review until there were multi-paragraph-long comment threads. My teammates were defensive, and I was at fault.
I tried a few approaches to fix this and observed other engineers who gave great code reviews. After learning a few tricks, I never ran into the same issues.
This article will give you 7 simple techniques I learned to respectfully give feedback in code reviews.
For each technique, I’ll give you examples of how and when to use it.
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Alright, let’s get into the techniques!
I wonder about the scalability of this solution. As the dataset grows, will this approach continue to perform well, or should we consider implementing pagination or lazy loading?
When to use it: When you want to suggest lightly while opening it up for discussion.
I'm curious about the use of this external library. Have we evaluated its performance impact and compatibility with our codebase?
