In the dynamic world of software development, maintaining high code quality and an efficient review process is paramount. In our projects, we’ve implemented a series of practices and tools that have significantly improved our workflow. This blog post shares how I established these steps in my organization to streamline the code review process and maintain code quality, focusing on linting, pre-commit hooks, and a robust pull request (PR) review process.

1. Standardizing Code with Linting

Linting is a crucial step to ensure that all developers adhere to the same coding standards. By integrating ESLint into our codebase, we can automatically enforce these standards, catching errors and inconsistencies early in the development process.

2. Ensuring Consistency with Pre-Commit Hooks

To further enhance our code quality, we’ve implemented pre-commit hooks using Husky. These hooks automatically check our code for linting errors and type issues before allowing a commit to proceed.

This is the link that I followed during setup the eslint and Precommit hooks-

https://medium.com/@kimperria/so-linters-what-are-they-why-and-how-to-set-up-in-nextjs-698ef58480d4

3. Streamlining the Code Review Process

A well-defined code review process is essential for maintaining code quality and team productivity. We use a pull request (PR) template to ensure consistency and thoroughness in our reviews. Here’s our PR template:

This template ensures that all critical aspects of the code are reviewed, including UI consistency, performance, and adherence to coding standards.

To set this up, create a folder named .github in your codebase. Inside this folder, create a file with the extension .md. If you’re using GitHub, follow this process to set up the template. Once configured, the template will automatically appear with each PR. If you’re using another platform like Bitbucket, there is an options to set a default description for PRs.

Additionally, we encourage keeping PRs to fewer than 20 files to make reviews more manageable. For larger changes, we use the concept of stacked PRs, which helps break down large tasks into smaller, more reviewable chunks.

Check this link for the more information about Stacked PRs – https://blog.logrocket.com/using-stacked-pull-requests-in-github/

Conclusion

By implementing these practices, we’ve been able to significantly improve our code quality and review process. Linting and pre-commit hooks catch issues early, while our PR template ensures thorough and consistent reviews. These tools and practices have helped us maintain a high standard of code quality and efficiency across our projects, ultimately leading to a more productive and satisfied development team. Feel free to adapt these practices to fit your project’s needs and share your experiences with us. Happy coding!