Code Review Load Balancer
Design a review queue that helps an engineering team assign pull requests by expertise, urgency, and reviewer capacity.
The brief
Understand the problem
Background
Review requests often accumulate around a few senior engineers. A simple oldest-first queue ignores ownership, risk, blocked releases, time zones, and whether the author has addressed prior feedback.
User context
Team lead Evelyn has twelve open pull requests and two available reviewers. One security fix is urgent, while several drafts are waiting for authors rather than reviewers.
Product problem
The team needs a fair, explainable queue that identifies actionable reviews and spreads work without assigning people outside their expertise or availability.
Objective
Design queue overview, review readiness, assignment, and handoff for a shared engineering review process.
What to design
Define the experience
Required experience
- Scan actionable review work and blocked states
- Inspect change risk, ownership, and requested expertise
- Assign or volunteer within capacity
- Hand off an incomplete review with context
Screens and states
- Team review queue
- Pull request review brief
- Reviewer assignment
- Review handoff
Core user flow
Follow the critical path
- 01
Evelyn filters out drafts and author-blocked changes
- 02
She opens the urgent security fix and checks required expertise
- 03
She assigns a qualified reviewer with current capacity
- 04
A second reviewer receives a documented handoff before the first goes offline
Product rules
Requirements and constraints
Requirements
- Separate author-blocked, reviewer-needed, in-review, and approval-complete states
- Show risk, size, affected owners, age, and release dependency
- Explain assignment suggestions through expertise and capacity
- Let reviewers set limits, availability, and decline reasons
Constraints
- Required code-owner rules cannot be bypassed
- Private repository metadata follows existing access
- Queue scoring must not become an individual performance metric
Reality check
States worth considering
Finish line
What to deliver
- Four desktop screens demonstrating capacity-aware assignment and handoff
Optional direction
Visual resources
Use these as a starting constraint if you want one. They are not part of the required solution.
Cherry Cream Soda & Josefin Sans
Clear interface writing gives people the confidence to understand what changed and decide what to do next.
Cherry Cream Soda & Josefin Sans
Clear interface writing gives people the confidence to understand what changed and decide what to do next.