  Increasing code velocity is a common goal for a variety of software projects.
The efficiency of the code review process significantly impacts how fast the
code gets merged into the final product and reaches the customers. We conducted
a survey to study the code velocity-related beliefs and practices in place. We
analyzed 75 completed surveys from 39 participants from the industry and 36
from the open-source community. Our critical findings are (a) the industry and
open-source community hold a similar set of beliefs, (b) quick reaction time is
of utmost importance and applies to the tooling infrastructure and the behavior
of other engineers, (c) time-to-merge is the essential code review metric to
improve, (d) engineers have differing opinions about the benefits of increased
code velocity for their career growth, and (e) the controlled application of
the commit-then-review model can increase code velocity. Our study supports the
continued need to invest in and improve code velocity regardless of the
underlying organizational ecosystem.
