Review small pull requests quickly

DORA lists heavyweight code review as a common trunk-based pitfall. When reviews need several approvals or wait a day, developers batch more work into each pull request to avoid the wait, which makes reviews bigger, slower and less careful.

What helps:

• Keep pull requests small enough to review in one sitting.
• Treat review requests as a priority, not something to get to after your own work.
• Pairing on a change counts as review; DORA notes that pair programming is a form of code review.
• Let automation catch formatting, lint and test failures so humans focus on design and correctness.

To check, measure the time from pull request opened to first review. If it is regularly longer than a working day, reviews are holding back integration.