It's a very common refrain but I don't really agree with it:
"How do you create a PR that can be reviewed in 5-10 minutes? By reducing the scope. A full feature should often be multiple PRs. A good rule of thumb is 300 lines of code changes - once you get above 500 lines, you're entering unreviewable territory."
The problem with doing this is if you're building something a lot bigger and more complex than 500 lines of code, splitting that up across multiple PR's will result in:
- A big queue of PR's for reviewers to review
- The of the feature is split across multiple change sets, increasing cognitive load (coherence is lost)
- You end up doing work on branches of branches, and end up either having to become a rebase ninja or having tons of conflicts as each PR gets merged underneath you
The right answer for the size of a PR is NOT in lines of code. Exercise judgement as to what is logically easier to review. Sometimes bigger is actually better, it depends. Learn from experience, communicate with each other, try to be kind when reviewing and don't block things up unnecessarily.
"How do you create a PR that can be reviewed in 5-10 minutes? By reducing the scope. A full feature should often be multiple PRs. A good rule of thumb is 300 lines of code changes - once you get above 500 lines, you're entering unreviewable territory."
The problem with doing this is if you're building something a lot bigger and more complex than 500 lines of code, splitting that up across multiple PR's will result in:
- A big queue of PR's for reviewers to review
- The of the feature is split across multiple change sets, increasing cognitive load (coherence is lost)
- You end up doing work on branches of branches, and end up either having to become a rebase ninja or having tons of conflicts as each PR gets merged underneath you
The right answer for the size of a PR is NOT in lines of code. Exercise judgement as to what is logically easier to review. Sometimes bigger is actually better, it depends. Learn from experience, communicate with each other, try to be kind when reviewing and don't block things up unnecessarily.