At one of the big tech companies I worked at, we had comprehensive documentation around code review best practices & coding style guides. This documentation has been open sourced and is publicly available (see code review best practices, java style guide etc). The standards incorporate best practices across coding languages/code reviews and are updated fairly frequently to incorporate new features as languages evolve. The big tech companies have a bunch of pretty smart folks coming up with these guidelines. However, like most things in software development, there is a caveat — the standards are ultimately a set of recommendations and can sometimes be subjective. For e.g. should the standard be to use tabs or spaces? (who are we kidding, tabs are clearly superior).
However, in spite of them seeming somewhat draconian at times, the standards go a long way in ensuring that code at these big tech companies is consistent, well structured and well reviewed. Most of all, it provides guidance to junior engineers who are still figuring out how to write clean, readable code.
Going from Google to Lyft, I observed two issues around code reviews on my team:
- PR iterations often took over a day to get reviewed
- Code reviews were shallow — they were either nit-picky or simply rubber stamped without the reviewer doing due diligence