A School of Continuous Improvement research poster follows code review at a software firm for eighteen months after it reorganised its engineers around the services they build.
At a software firm that redrew its teams around its services, review habits drifted back to the former lines within eighteen months
When a mid-sized software firm reorganised its engineers around the services they build, the organisation chart changed overnight and the code reviews took the long way back. That is the finding of Approved by the Old Team: Code-review authority after an inverse-Conway reorganisation, a new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement by Eskil Nwabueze, Doctoral Candidate, with Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, and Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor, Capability Sprints.
A pull request is a small act of trust, and we read a great many of them. I hope the engineers who wrote them will recognise themselves in the poster, and forgive us the counting.
— Eskil Nwabueze, Doctoral Candidate, School of Continuous Improvement
The team’s method treats each code review as a record of who relies on whom. Setting 41,600 merged changes and two years of meeting invitations against the firm’s own service architecture, the poster follows three channels of working relationship through the reorganisation and finds them parting ways. The reporting lines held. The calendar mostly held. Review congruence peaked within a quarter and then fell back towards the former team boundaries, falling first in the services that were later folded into their old teams.
Dr Nwachukwu said the result spoke directly to the work of Capability Sprints. “We have always held that a team is something people do rather than something they are told,” she said, “and it is good to have the reviewers’ word for it.”
The poster extends the School’s standing interest in what an organisation does after it has announced a change, and the University is pleased to see that interest reach the engineering floor.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ajeiwq.