Conversation

Why do some feature requests/bugs/whatever-s, even when they have defined acceptance criteria in a task, slow to a crawl at code review?

Excluding the obvious (no one doing reviews, improvements to code, etc.), a lot of the time it seems to boil down to *opinions*. Now, I'm not talking about "opinionated code style" nit-picks (though they're rarely constructive) — I'm referring solely to the sorts of -1s and comments which go:

- "I reckon.."
- "I'd prefer it if.."
- "Normally I would.."

Your opinion as a helpful software engineer reviewing a patch is incredibly valuable, and often those opinions help produce better code, reduce technical debt and ensure the acceptance criteria of the request is actually met.

Rarely though, they don't.
They bog a well-defined, criteria meeting patch down into days and weeks of needless discussion, until either the submitter gets bored and moves on (resulting in no new feature), or they give in to the opinions, modify their patch and walk away feeling brow beaten.

Guides like https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Guidelines_for_a_healthy_code_review_culture go a long way to try to capture some of these concerns and frustrations, but they're fairly pointless if people don't bother to read them.