How do you work with pull requests at work?
Hello friends,
I'm working on a small side-projects called PRBoard (https://prboard.dev). It's a dashboard for teams that host their repos on GitHub. I'm currently in the market-validation phase, and I think some of my assumptions on how this product can be helpful for teams are invalid. For this reason, I'm gathering different ways engineering teams work with pull requests.
For example, in my team, when someone creates a new pull request, they send a message on Slack about it. We rarely use GitHub's built-in "assignees" and "reviewers" features because usually, it's more than one person who can review a pull request. When someone picks a PR, they usually leave an emoji on the original slack message signalling that they're starting the review.
There's a couple of downsides to the described approach:
- No clear picture of all currently open PRs from my team. We structure code as one big monorepo with multiple teams working on separate code paths. This makes using GitHub's pull requests page almost impossible.
- No way to know when a pull request is ready to be reviewed. We have a CI pipeline running different checks for every PR. It makes little sense to review a pull request that hasn't passed all test yet since there might be failures and further changes to address them.
- There's no way for PR author to know when their pull request is ready to be merged
The idea behind PRBoard was to create a single place, a dashboard, that team uses to see what pull requests are out there as well as their state.
How does this process work in your team and are you happy with it? What's the most annoying part of reviewing others pull requests?
Regards!
I work on a mid sized team with 10+ devs. We have a large backlog of half reviewed PRs. I don't know if I want another dashboard, but we could use some automation for housekeeping. e.g. some ML magic to auto assign PR. nudge the reviewer after certain time. close out stale ones. etc.
+1 for "nudge the reviewer after certain time" - that happens to me A LOT!
hey Jay, how exactly do you nudge reviewers? Is it through slack? Some kind of direct messageing or something else?
Slack, although to be completely honest it's my team who nudges me. I'm the one who is usually delaying the review/pull and I'm in favor of automatic nudging to make me a better manager. Right now I have a calendar reminder to check GitHub each day, but things still fall through the cracks. I hope this helps!
oh yeah, it does a lot. I can relate to what you're saying. We have an internal tooling at work that allows people to "bump" a PR on slack, but it's not automatic. I imagine it be nice to have a feature to automatically bump a PR unless someone picks it up in N hours.
That’s interesting, thank you for sharing your pain. What does your team do to deal with those half-reviewed PRs now? Also, what’s the typical routine for your team to share PRs with each other and knowing when to review, when to merge or notify someone that you’re not happy and want some changes to be made?
At my last job we used a somewhat similar system and had similar issues. I think there is room for a product like this.
How do you deal with these issues right now? Is it by messaging on slack or some other way to notify others about new or forgotten PRs?
Right now I'm a freelancer working on solo projects so I don't have this problem.