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0 pointsjohnfn2y ago0 comments

It's because every time I switch from coding to reviewing, there's a context switch, and every time I switch back from reviewing to coding, there's another context switch. I can easily spend 30 minutes getting back into the flow of coding after doing something else.

One PR has 1 context switch. 10 PRs have 10.

To say nothing of the cascading effects of CR on early PRs. Oh, you want me to rename a variable that I used in the first PR? Looks like I'm spending the next 10 minutes combing through my other 9 diffs updating names. That would have been a 5 second refactor if I only had a single monolithic PR.

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klodolph2y ago

Yeah—on the other hand, I’ve gotten PRs that are just too damn big and that means that I can’t review them without sitting down and getting into the flow just for that review. What I end up doing is, after some false starts, getting myself a block of time to review the massive PR.

Let’s say I just finished up some change I’m working on, and I take a look at my coworker’s PR. It’s 11:45, and I’m heading to lunch in 15 minutes. If it’s a 10-150 line PR, I can probably review it within 15 minutes, and maybe I can review six or eight reviews like that in a day, when I stand up to get coffee or something like that.

If I see some 700-line PR coming through, I have to allocate some focus time to that, just like I were programming. It’s a burden.

brailsafe2y ago

I totally agree, and this was a point of conflict between my last manager and I. On one hand, he'd be on my case for not getting some coding done, and on the other he'd be on my case for not jumping on a massive PR right away. Part of the problem I think was that we had a very bottlenecked QA process and decoupled feedback systems for reviewing and discussing.

I'd get a large PR and some smaller ones on GitHub that would likely have tests included, so I'd have to check those too, while also maintaining conversation over on Jira about some other ticket and trying to actually get code written. There was no concept iteration because every unit change needed to simultaneously be broken up by 2 week sprint AND be completely unit tested and flawless before asking someone to review it or getting it merged. Meanwhile, I'd never know when someone updated their PR or Jira thread after discussing unless I manually checked or always kept the browser tab open.

So I'd take a full morning to review a PR, then respond to things on Jira, and if I'm lucky, write some code. Eventually the PR would be updated but I'd forget to check because there wasn't a good system in-place to manage those notifications, and when I did it'd be another massive change that I'd need to take quite a lot of time to check.

So I started using Draft PRs for bigger or more complex changes, and explicitly note what wasn't functioning or written yet, which would provide for lower pressure time to get early feedback instead of trying to complete everything up front, and updates to those PRs would be more incremental.

yellowapple2y ago

I've found that if a PR is sufficiently small then reviewing it doesn't entail quite as severe of a context switch as reviewing a larger PR. Something about it being shorter means I can keep some of the coding context fresh in my head so I can switch back to it quicker (whereas for a longer PR I need to jettison that context in order to comprehend the whole PR).