What is Nudgsicle?

Nudgsicle 'logo'

Nudgsicle is a tool that will help you get your team’s code reviewed and merged faster. It provides timely reminders about Pull Requests that still need review, so you can ship code more quickly and consistently. Sign up here to receive updates and get notified when it’s available!

How can you make your software team faster?

What is the number one thing you can change to help your software engineering team work faster? My initial thoughts would be to improve my team’s software design and coding skills so we can punch out more code. But the truth is, I’m pretty good at programming at this point in my career, and so are those on my team. I bet your team writes code efficiently as well.

For many of these experienced teams, one of the main bottlenecks of the development process is code review. In my experience, it hurts to spend significant time heads down working on something, to put it up for review, and then . . . crickets. The team, caught up in their own work, forgets that they need to prioritize reviewing the hard work I’ve already done. While I’m waiting, I move onto working on something else. This pattern of neglecting reviews can easily spread across the team—increasing work in progress, decreasing throughput, and generally slowing everything down.

I will soon be releasing Nudgsicle to help your team remember to prioritize code review by providing timely reminders regarding open Pull Requests that are in need of review. I’ve seen this approach help increase throughput and make teams more productive by giving more visibility to this bottleneck in the process.

Share your email address below to be notified when Nudgsicle is available. In the meantime, I’ll be sharing other techniques I have learned to keep the code flowing.

Recent Articles

Is Your Code Review Effective?

In this next installment of my series on code review (the first article was about why we do code review in the first place), we’ll be looking at how to review code effectively. There are several practices that I think make code review effective. In this article I want to focus on one particular one that – if you’re not doing it already – will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your code review.
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Why Do Code Review at All?

Code review – at least the type of code review I’m talking about in this blog series – is the process of asynchronously examining and commenting on someone else’s code before it is merged into the main branch of your source control repo. It is a common practice in software development, but why do we do it? Should we do it? What are the benefits of code review? Review Code for Software Quality One of the main reasons to do code review is to improve the quality of the software we produce.
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