Non-blocking code reviews

If your team wants or needs to do code reviews, but you don't want it to slow down development, you could implement non-blocking code reviews.

Instead of creating a topic branch for a feature or fix, creating a pull or merge request and waiting for it to be reviewed before merging, the commit is merged, and the code is reviewed afterwards.

The ticket workflow could look like this:

To Do -> Doing -> Merged -> Reviewed -> Tested -> Deployed

Or:

To Do -> Doing -> Merged -> Deployed -> Tested -> Reviewed

The focus is getting the update to production, and the review is deferred.

The same CI pipeline rules apply - it must be passing before the code can be deployed, so the same quality checks are run.

With this approach, the code is still reviewed, either in the pull or merge request or by the commits on the mainline branch if doing trunk-based development. It's just done later.

- Oliver

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About me

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I'm an Acquia-certified Drupal Triple Expert with 17 years of experience, an open-source software maintainer and Drupal core contributor, public speaker, live streamer, and host of the Beyond Blocks podcast.