These are good tips. One more thing, if we're talking GitHub specifically: the labels of the statuses you can give your review are somewhat misleading, in that

These are good tips. One more thing, if we're talking GitHub specifically: the labels of the statuses you can give your review are somewhat misleading, in that their actual effects don't quite match the labels. So: - "Request changes": this isn't so much a request, as it is "prevent this person from merging this until I specifically review it again". It's fairly harsh. - "Comment": effectively, "require another review before it can be merged, not necessarily by me". - "Approve": the submitter can merge it at their prerogative. It is very common for me to hit "approve" even though I've requested changes, as they're often > so trivial that you don’t think it needs a second review afterwards or even totally reasonable for someone to push back against or not implement. Sometimes I'll have seen a non-trivial bug, in which case I'll set it to "comment". I practically never use "request changes".