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How to document code review expectations and the criteria for merging pull requests.
A clear, durable guide for teams detailing review expectations, merge criteria, and the obligations of authors and reviewers, so code reviews become predictable, fair, and efficient across projects and teams.
Published by
Thomas Scott
August 09, 2025 - 3 min Read
Establishing documented review expectations creates a shared baseline that reduces back-and-forth, speeds work, and helps new contributors understand how decisions are made. Start by outlining who should review, the typical turnaround times, and the expected level of detail in feedback. Include a concrete description of what a successful review looks like, such as validating functionality, architecture alignment, and test coverage. Address common blockers, like dependencies, flaky tests, and missing documentation, so contributors can preemptively address them. Use plain language, avoid jargon, and provide examples of good and bad review notes. This foundation prevents misinterpretations and keeps conversations productive, even when teams scale or new members join.
In addition to general expectations, define the precise criteria for merging a pull request. List mandatory checks, such as passing CI, code style conformance, and adequate test coverage percentages. Clarify the minimum approvals required and whether changes must be reviewed by area owners or domain experts. Specify acceptance criteria for user-facing changes, including behavior, error handling, and accessibility considerations. Establish a policy for handling optional changes, like refactoring or documentation improvements, explaining whether they must be addressed before merge or can be staged. Document how to indicate blockers and how PRs should be updated to progress toward merging.
Role-based guidance and measurable checks improve review outcomes.
The first step in codifying expectations is to describe who participates in reviews and under what circumstances. For example, indicate that senior engineers approve critical changes, while a dedicated reviewer handles documentation accuracy. Define response time targets to keep momentum, such as a 24-hour window for first feedback and a 48-hour window for final decisions. Include guidance on how to escalate stalled PRs, whether through a reviewer ladder, a project lead, or a rotating gatekeeper role. Emphasize professional, specific feedback that focuses on the problem rather than the person. Provide templates or examples that show constructive wording, so contributors learn to phrase concerns clearly and respectfully.
Documenting merging criteria also helps align expectations with product goals and quality standards. Make explicit how to evaluate impact, risk, and maintainability. Require that changes include explicit test cases or verification steps, and that documentation is updated where necessary. Describe how to handle edge cases, performance considerations, and security implications. Outline how reviewers should assess rollback plans or feature flags, ensuring that releases remain controllable. Include guidance on how to annotate changes for reviewers who rely on visual or behavioral cues, such as UI or API consistency. Finally, explain how to treat partial or incremental improvements, clarifying when a PR can be merged with caveats and when it must wait for additional tweaks.
Clear author and reviewer duties build mutual accountability.
To ensure consistency, provide a structured framework for evaluating code as it arrives. Start with a quick triage that checks for scope alignment, test coverage, and obvious blockers. Then proceed to deeper technical checks, such as algorithmic efficiency, memory usage, and potential concurrency issues. Require that reviewers record explicit, verifiable observations rather than vague judgments. Encourage linking to relevant tickets, design documents, or architectural decisions so readers can trace intent. Offer a rubric that translates subjective impressions into objective signals, like pass/fail on specific criteria. This approach helps both new and experienced contributors understand exactly what is expected and why certain decisions are preferred.
Complement the framework with guidance for authors preparing PRs. Suggest a concise summary of the change, a list of affected modules, and a short rationale for why the change is necessary. Recommend including reproducible steps to test the behavior, plus any known limitations. Urge authors to run the full test suite locally, ensure branch cleanliness, and confirm that lint and formatting checks pass. Provide a checklist that reviewers can reuse, reducing the chance of missing critical items. Emphasize the importance of tying code changes back to user stories or acceptance criteria, so the merge decision remains aligned with customer value and long-term goals.
Practical templates help stabilize the review process over time.
A practical approach to documenting reviewer responsibilities is to assign explicit roles and expectations. Define a primary reviewer for functional correctness, a secondary reviewer for security or reliability, and an optional reviewer for accessibility or internationalization. State how many approvals are required for different kinds of changes, including hotfixes, experimental features, or major rewrites. Clarify how to handle reviews that reveal conflicting design patterns or architectural misalignments, including steps to propose alternatives and how to log dissent respectfully. Highlight the importance of timely replies and explicit resolution when disagreements arise, so the final decision remains transparent to all stakeholders.
The guidelines should also address feedback quality and tone. Encourage reviewers to avoid duplicative or non-specific notes and to suggest concrete code changes or references. Train reviewers to distinguish critical errors from nice-to-have improvements, so contributors aren’t overwhelmed by minor issues. Promote a culture of gratitude for helpful critique and a practice of thanking authors when changes meet expectations. Include examples of well-constructed feedback that explains the why behind a suggestion. Ensure the language used is inclusive and supportive, helping everyone improve without feeling discouraged.
Continuous improvement keeps code review valuable and fair.
Templates for common review scenarios can dramatically reduce friction. Provide ready-made prompts for when dependencies are missing, tests fail unexpectedly, or a feature is flagged for potential design concerns. Include a standard PR description template that summarizes the change, rationale, affected areas, and testing steps. Offer a checklist for reviewers that covers critical domains like correctness, performance, security, and accessibility. Encourage teams to tailor templates to their stack, documenting any area-specific rules. By giving structure upfront, teams can complete reviews more quickly and with greater confidence in the resulting merge decisions.
Governance around changes to the review process itself is essential for longevity. Establish a periodic review of the documentation to ensure it reflects current practices and tooling. Create a mechanism for collecting feedback on the usefulness of the criteria and adjust thresholds as the codebase grows. Document exceptions and edge cases, such as legacy branches or multi-repo changes, so teams can navigate complexity without ambiguity. Build a living document that evolves with your engineering culture, not a rigid checklist that becomes obsolete. Finally, commit to training sessions or walkthroughs for new hires to reinforce the documented standards.
In addition to the core rules, include guidance on how to handle disagreements respectfully. Encourage open dialogue about trade-offs and ensure voices from different domains are heard. Create a process for reviving stalled reviews by scheduling a concise, focused discussion with the right participants. Emphasize the importance of documentation updates when policies change and remind teams to re-validate existing PRs against the new standards. Provide resources for self-study, such as design guidelines, security checklists, and accessibility principles. This ongoing investment helps maintain trust in the review system and supports consistent quality across delivery teams.
Finally, anchor the documentation in real-world outcomes, linking it to measurable improvements. Track metrics like time-to-merge, defect rates post-merge, and reviewer workload balance to gauge effectiveness. Celebrate examples where adherence to documented criteria prevented regressions or improved user experience. Use retrospective sessions to reflect on lessons learned and adjust the process accordingly. Ensure visibility by publishing the guidelines in a prominent place within the repository and communicating updates to all contributors. A well-maintained, evergreen framework for code review expectations fosters healthier collaboration and better software over time.
