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We are following peer code review practice, where each dev has to review his peer's code before committing to master.

As a PM how I can monitor that those review comments on github are effective and making sense.

Any help appreciated

Thanks in Advance

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    Why do you need to do it? In my opinion, it's not a PM responsibility. Jun 24, 2015 at 15:08
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    I'll echo DB, what's the purpose of the measurement. Sounds like this could be a vanity metric and not providing real value. The landmines of setting something like this up are extensive. Jun 24, 2015 at 15:16
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    I can see this being part of a PM remit if it forms part of the Quality Assurance on the project, and related KPIs in the Acceptance Criteria. This could be likely for a software house, particularly small ones, where there is some overlap between Team Lead and PM. Therefore I think the comments challenging this could be part of valid answers rather than comments, but I think the overall question could still be on-topic for Project Management to some degree.
    – Marv Mills
    Jun 24, 2015 at 16:01

3 Answers 3

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If you want to monitor the effectiveness of the comments, have you considered putting in a code review - review system? So the person being reviewed could rate the helpfulness of the feedback from 1-5 or something. This way, you could measure the effectiveness of the code reviews people are giving without having to make the determination on your own. The rating would be coming from the people who's code was reviewed.

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My answer is: you should not to monitor review comments at all.

  • Try to trust to your team. It's help to avoid micromanagement (like monitoring review comments).
  • If you are Project Manager, you should think about business. If you are Functional Manager, you should think about development process. But only developers (including tech lead and architect) should care about technical details (Code Review exactly about technical details). Technical competence of your development team should be much higher then yours. In other case, your development team have extremely low technical skills.

In additional, I can describe how we make Code Review in our team:

First of all, all developers are involved in Code Review. We use Git. When somebody create Pull Request from his fork to origin, every developer of our team should review and approve it. Pull Request should be approved by (amount of developers - 2) developers before merge.

This approach have two advantages:

  • Collective code ownership. Everybody knows what colleagues are doing. Everyone have knowledge about whole code. If somebody made a mistake, part of responsibility for it should take other team members.

  • Collective mind can find much more weak places and poor decisions in code.

Somebody might say that such approach would lead to eternal debates and conflicts. But I never had these problems in my practice.

You can ask more technical details in programmers.stackexchange.com.

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  • Many project managers have graduated from being developers. And the case that your dev team should be highly skilled is an ideal scenario unfortunately in real life scenario you can be stuck with relatively fresh programmers who might not do a good review. So
    – ViSu
    Jun 25, 2015 at 8:43
  • @ViSu Of course, there are a lot of PMs which was developers in the past. But now they are PMs. In my opinion, situation when one person try to be a manager and a programmer in the same time is management anti-pattern. This person will lose his programming skills extremely fast and never will be a good manager. He will not have so much time to be a professional in two areas at once. Jun 25, 2015 at 13:40
  • @ViSu I believe in division of labour. I think that PM should be expert in project management and Developer should be expert in programming. If PM have more competency in programming (than Developer), that means something going wrong. It's just my opinion, of course. Jun 25, 2015 at 13:42
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You can track the stories which were reviewed by the person. And also track issues/bugs which were found in the stories. Now do the math and find out how many bugs (ratio) are found in the code reviewed by person X.

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  • Issues might be functional and not related with code, or there might be case that there is no single issue in functionality but code is not upto the mark, there are some security or optimization concerns which are not reviewed by person, so how to keep eye on that?
    – PrashantG
    Jun 29, 2015 at 10:03

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