explaingit

google/eng-practices

Analysis updated 2026-06-21

★ 20,543Audience · developerComplexity · 1/5LicenseSetup · easy

TLDR

Google's publicly shared engineering guidelines covering how to run code reviews effectively, written for both reviewers and change authors based on practices used across all of Google's engineering teams.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    Content
      Reviewer guide
      Author guide
      Terminology glossary
    Reviewer Topics
      What to look for
      Speed of review
      Handling pushback
    Author Topics
      Writing good CLs
      Small change size
      CL descriptions
    Audience
      Engineering teams
      Open source projects
      New engineers
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Code map

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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Adopt Google's code review process as the standard for your team's pull request workflow.

USE CASE 2

Use the Change Author's Guide to write better pull request descriptions and smaller easier-to-review changes.

USE CASE 3

Share the Code Reviewer's Guide with new team members to set consistent expectations for review quality.

USE CASE 4

Reference Google's criteria for what makes a change ready to merge when resolving review disagreements.

How does it compare?

google/eng-practicesfengdu78/deeplearning_ai_booksqax-os/excelize
Stars20,54320,53920,553
Language—HTMLGo
Setup difficultyeasyeasyeasy
Complexity1/52/52/5
Audiencedeveloperdeveloperdeveloper

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min
CC-By 3.0, share and adapt freely as long as you credit Google as the source.

In plain English

This repository contains Google's Engineering Practices documentation, which covers generalized engineering practices developed across all languages and projects at Google. The documentation is published publicly so that open source projects and other organizations can benefit from Google's accumulated experience. Currently it contains Google's Code Review Guidelines, which consists of two separate guides: the Code Reviewer's Guide and the Change Author's Guide. The documents use some Google-internal terminology, including CL (changelist, equivalent to a change, patch, or pull request) and LGTM (Looks Good to Me, used when a reviewer approves a CL). The documents are licensed under CC-By 3.0.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Based on Google's code review guidelines, what should I include in a pull request description to make it easy for a reviewer to approve quickly?
Prompt 2
How does Google recommend a code reviewer handle disagreement with the author's approach when the code still works?
Prompt 3
What does Google's eng-practices guide say about how large a single pull request or code change should be?
Prompt 4
Help me draft a one-page summary of Google's code review best practices I can use for onboarding new engineers.

Frequently asked questions

What is eng-practices?

Google's publicly shared engineering guidelines covering how to run code reviews effectively, written for both reviewers and change authors based on practices used across all of Google's engineering teams.

What license does eng-practices use?

CC-By 3.0, share and adapt freely as long as you credit Google as the source.

How hard is eng-practices to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated easy, with roughly 5min to a first successful run.

Who is eng-practices for?

Mainly developer.

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