The Tool Desk
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Start with the change’s purpose and scope
Before following individual lines, establish what the pull request is meant to change for users or for the system. Google’s published reviewer guidance recommends considering both how a change fits the larger design and whether it is the right change to make now.
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- Can you describe the intended outcome in one sentence?
- Does the diff deliver that outcome, or introduce unrelated behavior?
- Do the changed components belong at these system boundaries, and do they fit the surrounding design?
- Is the change addressing a demonstrated need, or adding speculative generality?
Then compare the implementation with the user impact: code can do exactly what its author intended and still produce an undesirable result for users.
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For each important path, identify the conditions that must hold for it to behave correctly. Logic errors often sit at boundaries, in failure handling, or where components interact. Adapt these prompts to the code being changed; not every case applies to every diff.
#1 Best Overall
- Inputs and state: What happens with missing, malformed, empty, duplicate, or unexpected input? Are nullability, ranges, permissions, and valid state transitions explicit?
- Boundaries and branches: What happens at minimum and maximum values? Are conditions inverted, unreachable, or missing a meaningful state?
- Failures and external dependencies: Are timeouts, retries, and error responses handled consistently with successful responses? What if an external service returns incomplete or unexpected data?
- Ordering and concurrency: Does correctness depend on operation order? Could concurrent operations interleave and violate an invariant?
- Authorization: If a parameter selects an action or business rule, is it correctly mapped to the caller’s privileges and permitted actions? OWASP’s Code Review Guide v2 includes this as a business-logic review concern.
Follow a representative value through the relevant branches rather than assuming the happy path tells the whole story. For a condition that accepts values below a limit, for example, consider the value just below the limit, the limit itself, and the value just above it. The point is to find which assumptions are enforced and which are merely hoped for.
Evaluate tests as possible counterexamples
A test suite is evidence about behavior, not proof that the change is correct. Google’s reviewer guide advises checking whether tests would fail if the code were broken and whether the change has appropriate unit, integration, or end-to-end coverage.
Rank #2
- Do tests cover the behavior that changed, including a meaningful boundary or failure case when the risk warrants it?
- Would a test fail if the central condition were reversed, a boundary shifted, or an error path skipped?
- Are assertions specific enough to detect a regression, rather than merely execute the code?
- Are the tests themselves understandable and maintainable?
- Is the appropriate level of coverage present: unit, integration, end-to-end, or a combination?
Separate two questions: whether the author reports that tests passed, and whether the test design would expose a likely defect. A passing run does not answer the second question by itself.
Look for complexity that makes future changes fragile
Fragility is not limited to incorrect output today. Unnecessary indirection, vague names, and undocumented behavior can make later changes unsafe. Google’s code review overview identifies design, functionality, complexity, tests, naming, comments, style, and documentation as review dimensions.
Rank #3
- Is this the simplest design that meets the demonstrated need?
- Does an abstraction make the current behavior clearer, or add indirection and speculative features?
- Could another developer understand the code and use it correctly later?
- Do names reveal intent, especially around booleans, state, and side effects?
- Do comments explain why a decision exists, rather than restating what the code already says?
- Does changed behavior require an update to user-facing or developer documentation?
Documentation matters when a change affects how the software is built, tested, used, or released. Missing explanation can turn a correct implementation into a fragile assumption for the next person who works on it.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Match review depth to risk and expertise
Not every diff needs the same scrutiny. Spend more attention where user impact, behavioral complexity, or failure severity is high, and involve someone with relevant expertise when the change crosses into a specialized area. Google’s standard of code review frames review around improving code health while allowing useful work to proceed.
- Does this change touch security, privacy, concurrency, accessibility, internationalization, or another area that needs specialist judgment?
- Can you explain each important part of the implementation? If not, ask the author for clarification rather than approving code you cannot assess.
- Is the appropriate code owner or subject-matter reviewer involved?
- Is the requested change necessary to address a real correctness, maintainability, or user-impact concern?
A checklist cannot replace domain-specific review for regulated or safety-critical systems. Treat specialist questions as a reason to add qualified review, not as boxes that a general-purpose checklist can certify.
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A short pull request template can gather context before reviewers begin: the purpose of the change, related issue links, testing notes, and any relevant checklist confirmation. GitHub documents templates and ownership-based review workflows in Managing and standardizing pull requests.
Keep intake prompts short, then apply deeper reasoning to changed behavior and high-risk areas. A long checklist applied mechanically can encourage box-ticking instead of careful review.
Reference status
Google’s engineering-practices pages remain useful published guidance, but the repository containing them was reported archived on November 21, 2025; GitHub’s repository page provides that status. The archive does not make the guidance a substitute for current, domain-specific standards.
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