google/eng-practicesPublicArchived

Google's Engineering Practices documentation

AI summary: A comprehensive public repository of Google's internal engineering practices and code review guidelines.

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OtherCreated Sep 4, 2019Last push 1y ago+-7 stars this week+-8 this month

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since Sep 1, 2019
010K20KSep 2019Dec 2021Mar 2024Aug 2026
23.3K stars as of Aug 7, 2026, tracked back to Sep 1, 2019. Historical curve reconstructed from public GitHub event archives, calibrated to the current total.

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  • Widely adopted

    23,314 stars

  • Battle-tested

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What eng-practices does

This repository serves as the definitive public source for Google's generalized engineering practices, distilled from decades of managing massive-scale software projects. It primarily focuses on the human processes of software engineering, notably providing extensive, detailed guidelines on how to conduct effective code reviews. The documentation covers both the responsibilities of the reviewer and the author, aiming to standardize expectations and improve code velocity without sacrificing quality. The practices presented are language-agnostic and emphasize clarity, maintainability, and psychological safety in technical environments. It acts as a foundational text for organizations looking to mature their engineering culture.

Software engineers, tech leads, and engineering managers seeking to establish or improve code review processes and overall engineering culture. Applicable to developers at all experience levels.

  • Code Review Standards: Defines explicit criteria for what reviewers should look for, balancing perfection with continuous progress.
  • Author Guidelines: Provides strategies for authors to structure CLs (Changelists) to ensure swift and painless reviews.
  • Language-Agnostic Principles: Focuses on architectural and cultural principles that apply regardless of the specific technology stack.
  • Conflict Resolution: Offers practical advice for resolving technical disagreements professionally during the review process.
  • Historical Context: Represents the collective experience and evolving standards of one of the world's largest engineering organizations.

Where teams use it

Engineering Onboarding

Engineering managers incorporate these documents into onboarding processes to align new hires with team quality expectations.

Process Standardization

Startups adopting formal code review processes use these guidelines as a foundational template to avoid common pitfalls.

Culture Improvement

Tech leads reference the conflict resolution sections to mediate disputes and foster a more collaborative review environment.

Quality Assurance

Individual developers review the guidelines to self-correct their pull requests before submitting them to peers.

Getting started: Start by reading the 'Google's Code Review Guidelines' document located in the repository root.

README

master branch

Google Engineering Practices Documentation

Google has many generalized engineering practices that cover all languages and all projects. These documents represent our collective experience of various best practices that we have developed over time. It is possible that open source projects or other organizations would benefit from this knowledge, so we work to make it available publicly when possible.

Currently this contains the following documents:

Terminology

There is some Google-internal terminology used in some of these documents, which we clarify here for external readers:

  • CL: Stands for "changelist", which means one self-contained change that has been submitted to version control or which is undergoing code review. Other organizations often call this a "change", "patch", or "pull-request".
  • LGTM: Means "Looks Good to Me". It is what a code reviewer says when approving a CL.

License

The documents in this project are licensed under the CC-By 3.0 License, which encourages you to share these documents. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ for more details.

Creative Commons License

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