Key Insights:

• Importance of Code Reviews: Code reviews are essential for error detection, understanding new features, adhering to coding standards, and ensuring only reviewed code is deployed.
• Emotional Impact: Emotional dynamics play a significant role, with 30% of developers reviewing code from less favored colleagues, which can lead to biased judgments and negative feelings.
• Striving for Objectivity: Despite personal feelings, approximately 76% of developers strive for objectivity to maintain professionalism.
• Impact of Developer Experience: The experience level of a developer also influences the depth of code reviews and the manner in which feedback is provided.
• Perceptions Formed: Reviewers' perceptions of code quality can affect their views on the author's skills or character.

Strategies to Mitigate Bias: The episode outlines multiple strategies to reduce bias in code reviews, such as involving multiple reviewers, standardizing review criteria, and implementing anonymous reviews.

Additional Resources:

• Read the full paper called "How social interactions can affect Modern Code Review"
• Visit awesomecodereviews.com to discover Dr. McKayla’s latest article on the top 10 code review techniques and methodologies, including systematic approaches like using checklists and change-impact analysis.

Conclusion: The podcast sheds light on both the positive and negative impacts of human factors in code reviews and emphasizes the need for strategies to minimize bias, enhancing both code quality and team dynamics.

Episode Resources:
Paper on improving developer experience
Abi's thoughts on the DX paper
Abi Noda's LinkedIn
Abi's podcast for Engineering Enablement leaders

About Abi Noda
Abi Noda is the CEO and founder of DX, a company that helps measure and improve developer experience.

Episode Resources:
What is platform engineering?
What is an internal developer platform?
What is Dynamic Configuration Management?
Salesman tricks for the Platform Engineer
Platform Engineering community
PlatformCon 2023
Luca’s LinkedIn and Twitter

About Luca Galante
Luca is leading product at Humanitec, saw hundreds of DevOps and platform setups, and shares his learnings in his weekly newsletter PlatformWeekly (with 10k subscribers). He is also the core contributor to the Platform Engineering community, with 10k+ meetup members, and 8k+ Slack members.

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