

Our aim was to understand how exactly code reviews are done at Microsoft.

In a large scale study on code reviews at Microsoft, we interviewed, observed and surveyed more than 900 developers about their code review practices. Click To Tweetīecause code reviews play such an important role in the Microsoft development process, it was an ideal target for us to dig deeper and really understand the benefits and drawbacks of this practice. At Microsoft, code reviewing is a highly adopted engineering practice and perceived as a great best practice. And most high-performing teams spend a lot of time doing code reviews. Thousands of engineers perceive it as a great best practice.

One of the important facts when it comes to code reviews at Microsoft is that it is a highly adopted engineering practice. Code reviews at Microsoft are an integral part of the development process And code reviews play a big role at Microsoft to allow smooth collaboration at such a large scale. As you can imagine, it is a non-trivial task to ensure code developed by different sub-teams actually works perfectly together. I say all this to give you some context and perspective of what it means to coordinate and manage the software development process. Several products such as Office, Visual Studio or Windows are developed by thousands of engineers that work on the same code base simultaneously. Approximately 44% of them, that means over 60,000 employees, are engineers. To begin with, let me give you some key information about Microsoft. Let’s find out in this post, which is part of a larger blog post series about code reviews showing you code review best practices, code review pitfalls, how code reviews work at Google, and much more. Is it a common practice? Are developers required to do code reviews? And which tools do they use? That’s why together with my colleagues, we investigated how code reviews are done at Microsoft.

Have you ever wondered how one of the largest software companies worldwide ensures high-quality code through code reviewing? How does code review work at one of the largest software companies?
