> When you receive a review with a hundred comments, it’s very hard to engage with that review on anything other than a trivial level.
Wow, that seems crazy. I can only hope I never have to work with somebody who thinks it is productive to leave that many comments on a change -- I genuinely cannot imagine any change that could ever require that.
I've had some PRs that would have required a ton of comments. There are usually two ways I handle this:
If the PR went in a completely different direction and missed the goal by a lot, I take ownership of it (with a brief explanation) and re-implement it. I then use the new PR for a pairing session, where I walk through both PRs with the original author for learning purposes.
If it’s mostly smaller issues, I schedule a half-hour pairing session with the author and review everything together, after preparing a list of issues.
Doing it any other way puts too much burden on the author to guess what the reviewer wants, and it slows down velocity significantly.
In those situations, the more productive option to course-correct is to talk to the change author in a meeting/chat instead of just volleying off a tsunami of comments about various minutiae in the change IMO.
Wow, that seems crazy. I can only hope I never have to work with somebody who thinks it is productive to leave that many comments on a change -- I genuinely cannot imagine any change that could ever require that.
Great article, fully agree with all the points.