Code Review Philosophy and Practice Questions

Covers the approach to conducting effective code reviews, including what reviewers look for and how reviewers provide constructive feedback. Topics include evaluating correctness, design and architecture, complexity, test coverage and quality, performance, security considerations, readability and maintainability, and consistency with style and team conventions. Includes techniques for balancing thoroughness and development velocity, using checklists and automation to reduce repetitive comments, unblocking reviewees, preserving morale and psychological safety, resolving disagreements, and using code reviews as opportunities for mentoring and knowledge transfer. Candidates may also discuss tooling, review workflow, time boxing, and metrics for measuring review effectiveness such as review turnaround time and post review defect rates.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Given historical PR metadata and production bug reports, propose a machine learning or heuristic approach to predict which incoming PRs are at high risk of producing post-merge defects. What features would you extract, how would you validate model performance, and how would you integrate predictions into the review workflow without causing reviewer overload?

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Timeboxing reviews helps keep velocity high. What is your personal timebox for reviewing a small PR (under 200 lines) and a medium PR (200-1000 lines)? Describe how you triage and prioritize which files or changes to review first within the timebox.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You observe several flaky tests in CI that pass locally but fail intermittently on the pipeline. As a reviewer and engineer, describe a triage and remediation plan that includes reproducibility steps, isolation, test redesign, timeboxing, and preventing future flaky tests. Include how you'd communicate status to the team.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You notice a PR with several TODO comments that say 'fix security later'. As a reviewer, how do you triage these TODOs? Propose a policy for handling TODOs found during review that balances shipping velocity and technical debt, and specify actionable labels, timelines, or gates you would apply.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

When reviewing test code, what distinguishes a high-quality test from a brittle or misleading test? Provide a list of checks you would perform on tests in a PR, including test coverage, assertions scope, mocking strategy, test data management, and determinism, with a one-sentence rationale for each.

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