How to Speed Up Code Reviews Without Adding More Process
Slow code reviews are rarely a discipline problem. They're a communication problem. Here's how high-performing teams keep PRs moving without standups, SLAs, or guilt.
Slow code reviews come up in every engineering retrospective eventually. PRs sit for days. Developers context-switch away. By the time someone reviews, the author has forgotten the details and the merge conflicts have piled up.
The instinct is to add process: review SLAs, daily standby rotations, Jira tickets for reviews. But process rarely fixes what is fundamentally a communication gap.
The real bottleneck isn't laziness
Most developers don't ignore PRs on purpose. The pattern is more mundane:
- A PR is opened and GitHub sends an email notification
- The email lands in a folder with 47 other GitHub notifications
- The developer sees it hours later, maybe, between meetings
- By then they're deep in their own work and think "I'll get to it after this"
- They forget
A discussion on r/ExperiencedDevs shows this is near-universal. Developers describe tagging 5+ reviewers hoping someone responds, reviews getting dismissed when new commits are pushed, and the awkward dance of DMing teammates to ask "hey, can you look at my PR?"
The problem isn't motivation. It's that the notification didn't reach the right person in the right context at the right time.
What actually works
Teams that move fast on reviews tend to share a few patterns — none of which involve more meetings or tracking spreadsheets.
Notifications go where people already are. Email is where GitHub notifications go to die. Teams with fast review cycles route notifications to Slack, where developers are already working. But not to a noisy channel — to the specific person who needs to act.
One notification, one action. The best review notification tells you exactly what to do: "This PR needs your review. Here's the link." Not a thread of 15 webhook events about CI runs and label changes.
Updates replace, not stack. When a PR's status changes — new commits pushed, CI passes, someone approves — the existing notification should update in place. A thread of 8 messages about one PR trains people to ignore all of them.
The author doesn't have to chase. If the system handles routing and reminders, the author can stay focused on their next task instead of playing project manager for their own PR.
The process trap
It's tempting to solve slow reviews with rules: "All PRs must be reviewed within 4 hours." "Each developer must review 2 PRs per day." "We'll track review times in our sprint metrics."
These create compliance without fixing the underlying issue. Developers start rubber-stamping to hit the SLA. Review quality drops. The metric looks great while the code gets worse.
A thread on r/webdev captures the frustration: a developer whose team tried review SLAs found that people would leave "LGTM" comments without actually reading the code, just to clear the queue.
The teams that sustain fast reviews treat it as a workflow design problem, not a discipline problem.
When SLAs actually help (and how to build them right)
That said, teams that do implement review SLAs successfully follow a two-part approach: fix the notification pipeline first, THEN set realistic expectations.
Step 1: Make SLAs achievable. Before setting a "4-hour review" expectation, ensure reviewers learn about PRs within minutes of them being opened. A review SLA is meaningless if it takes 3 hours just to discover the PR exists.
Step 2: Use tiered expectations. Not all PRs are equal. Effective teams set different thresholds: small changes (< 100 lines) get 2-hour response times, medium PRs get 4 hours, large PRs get one business day but require acknowledgment within 2 hours.
Step 3: Measure what matters. Track time to first response, notification-to-response time (isolates reviewer behavior from notification lag), and stale PR rate (PRs with no activity for 24+ hours). These reveal whether your bottleneck is awareness or reviewer capacity.
The key insight: review SLAs fail when they're behavioral mandates without infrastructure support. When notifications reliably reach reviewers in real-time, SLAs become achievable guidelines rather than impossible targets.
Small changes that compound
If your team's review cycle is slow, try these before reaching for process:
Keep PRs small. A 50-line PR gets reviewed in minutes. A 500-line PR gets reviewed "later" (which means never). If a feature is big, break it into reviewable chunks. This is the single highest-leverage change most teams can make.
Make the ask specific. "Can you review this?" is weaker than "@mike this touches the auth middleware you wrote — can you check the token validation logic?" Specific asks get faster responses because the reviewer knows exactly what's needed and why they're the right person.
Automate the routing. Don't make the author figure out who should review. Use CODEOWNERS, or a tool that maps reviewers to code areas automatically. The less friction in assigning reviewers, the faster the cycle starts.
Notify in context. Move PR notifications from email to wherever your team communicates. A Slack DM with a direct link to the PR is worth more than 10 email notifications buried in a folder.
What we built
Tenpace automates the communication layer around PRs. When a PR is opened, it sends one Slack message to the right reviewers with the context they need. When the PR's status changes, it updates that same message instead of creating noise.
No review SLAs. No tracking dashboards. Just the right notification to the right person.
We're in beta and it's free — try it out if your team's review cycle could use a boost.
Have a workflow that works for your team? We'd love to hear about it: hello@tenpace.com