this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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A 15000 line PR landing on a Friday evening for the lucky random reviewer to open on Monday. "Please approve it fast so we avoid too many conflicts."
I would review it and immediately tell them to break it into bite sized PRs.
My coworker kept doing that. We had several talks about it. Other members of our team had talks about it with them, and even our manager. Finally, I marked the PR as needs work, told them to break it into several PRs. They weren't happy, but I was tired of dealing with PRs that were 30+ files, unrelated in change, and over 1500 lines of code changes. They were pretty mad at me for a while. But it stopped shortly afterwards.
It shouldn't take more than an hour to review a PR.
There is no context here though?
If this is a breaking change to a major upgrade path, like a major base UI lib change, then it might not be possible to be broken down into pieces without tripping or quadrupling the work (which likely took a few folks all month to achieve already).
I remember in a previous job migrating from Vue 1 to Vue 2. And upgrading to an entirely new UI library. It required partial code freezes, and we figured it had to be done in 1 big push. It was only 3 of us doing it while the rest of the team kept up on maintenance & feature work.
The PR was something like 38k loc, of actual UI code, excluding package/lock files. It took the team an entire dedicated week and a half to review, piece by piece. We chewet through hundreds of comments during that time. It worked out really well, everyone was happy, the timelines where even met early.
The same thing happened when migrating an asp.net .Net Framework 4.x codebase to .Net Core 3.1. we figured that bundling in major refactors during the process to get the biggest bang for our buck was the best move. It was some light like 18k loc. Which also worked out similarly well in the end .
Things like this happen, not that infrequently depending on the org, and they work out just fine as long as you have a competent and well organized team who can maintain a course for more than a few weeks.
The follow on. Lots and LOTS of unrelated changes can be a symptom of an immature codebase/product, simply a new endeavor.
If it's a greenfield project, in order to move fast you don't want to gold plate or over predictive future. This often means you run into misc design blockers constantly. Which often necessitate refactors & improvements along the way. Depending on the team this can be broken out into the refactor, then the feature, and reviewed back-to-back. This does have it's downsides though, as the scope of the design may become obfuscated and may lead to ineffective code review.
Ofc mature codebases don't often suffer from the same issues, and most of the foundational problems are solved. And patterns have been well established.
/ramble
It was simply constant refactors, moving random stuff, etc. like, every week. It was unnecessary change.
Yeah I've been working a lot in my life in seed stage startups and it is quite common in the early stages... I try to make things change though.
I'd be pulled up at my job for any PR exceeding a few hundred lines. I don't even know what they'd do if I just dropped a 15000 line stinker.
Just a few hundred?
That's seems awfully short no? We're talking a couple hours of good flow state, that may not even be a full feature at that point 🤔
We have folks who can push out 600-1k loc covering multiple features/PRs in a day if they're having a great day and are working somewhere they are proficient.
Never mind important refactors that might touch a thousand or a few thousand lines that might be pushed out on a daily basis, and need relatively fast turnarounds.
Essentially half of the job of writing code is also reviewing code, it really should be thought of that way.
(No, loc is not a unit of performance measurement, but it can correlate)
To be honest, I agree they should be able to be larger at times.
I had a lot of disagreements when I was on a new codebase, knew what I was doing and I was able to push a lot of code out each day.
The idea is to have them small, easily readable with a tight feedback loop. I argued that bootstrapping a project will have a lot of new code at once to lay the foundations and my communication with the team was enough feedback. If I split it up, each PR would have been an incomplete idea and would have garnered a bunch of unnecessary questions.
That said, I think it's generally pretty easy to put out multiple PRs in a day, keeping them small and specific. As you say, half of the job is reading code and it's nicer to give my coworkers a set of PRs broken down into bite sized pieces.