Is this a great idea to ship code faster?
Recently i joined a new team working on an e-commerce website for a big company, we use Bitbucket Cloud for version control and Microsoft Teams for communication.
First thing i had to do is to fix some minor bugs so i fixed them after that i opened a pull request, what was surprising for me is the time it takes (2 days) to have my pull request validated and merged, so by curiosity i asked my tech lead about that he said sometimes when he receives email from Bitbucket to review some PRs he simply ignores it because maybe he didn’t have space at that time. And i was like it’s easy it should be some bitbucket and microsoft teams integration app that can helps us to solve this issue, indeed we found it and we gave it a try it was working fine every time someone open a PR we get notified to do the review but it didn’t solve the problem, why ? Because we receive the notifications and if we ignore it because of bad timing we don’t have any kind of reminders to do so. And really this was the real issue for us and we didn’t find a way to solve it til now.
This weekend i was thinking why not building it my self and maybe share it with other developers having same issue what do you think is it a great idea ? I need your feedbacks, And I built a simple landing page to collect some developers emails for the beta version if you think that it could solve your issue you could leave your email to get notified when the beta is released.
⚡️ https://pullthunder.com ⚡️
Amine, have you tried the 5-why's approach here?
I know the problem you are describing, but I don't think the comms is either the root cause or the solution here.
From my experience the real problem is that your PR is not a high priority for the manager. He read and replied to numerous other emails and Teams messages in the meantime and chose to ignore yours.
Would nagging him with more messages help?
Maybe.
Is it going to work long term? Probably not.
You can do a simple test of that hypothesis by putting more pressure on him to review your PRs and see what response you get and which way it is trending.
Sorry for being a wet blanket :)
Hey, if that helped maybe you can help me with my https://www.indiehackers.com/product/open-directory-of-software-developers by answering a few questions as an engineer?
Hey @rimutaka thanks a lot for your feedback,
there is a lot of things causing the issue (PRs took forever before getting merged):
to be honest there is a long list of reasons why the PRs took too long before the merge. what do you think ?
and i'll take a look at your product.
Thank you.
Sounds like a useful tool and might definitely get some users as a free integration. I think Teams is a good, mainstream platform, but Bitbucket very niche. Maybe include Gitlab and Github if the overall concept works?
Framing is super important here: Devtools are notoriously difficult to monetize. I think your "Insights and statistics" portion is the part that might sell, especially targeting non-technical managers who feel they need more metrics to rank/reward/fire developers.
Hey @Digibard,
Maybe i'll include gitlab and github later as github already have the reminder system you can read about it here https://docs.github.com/en/organizations/organizing-members-into-teams/managing-scheduled-reminders-for-your-team and totally agree the insights could play an important role do add value specially for managers
The bigger problem here is the culture issue that causes delayed code review.
I totally agree with you, that's why i'm trying to solve that by adopting reminders approach, let's say we are a dev team it would be nice to set a reminder for the open PRs every working day at 9AM the reminder inform the team about the pending PRs and who's the reviewer that we are waiting for, in other case if every friday in 2 weeks we have to showcase a feature it would be nice to have a reminder set for x days before that friday.
Yeah I get what you're attempting to do, but this is a team priorities issue that I'm guessing won't be solved by reminders. As someone who has been on teams with this same issue, it was often the bigger issue that writing code was prioritized OVER getting other code live. The issue was NOT that folks weren't remembering to review code.
Yeah i understand your point and what i can see here is there is 2 problems maybe in some context indeed the team members prioritize writing code over reviewing colleagues code but this not always the case i'll give a real example of me happened just today, yesterday i opened a PR today morning our techlead wrote a comment on my PR i didn't receive a notification actually i did in my inbox and to be honest who check his inbox every 2 hours so i ended up seeing the comment til the last of the day if for example i received a message in my DM it wouldn't be the case and there is more and more scenarios like these i'll mention some of them:
one or more reviewers are busy at that time and when they got time they forgot about it. (Solution: daily reminder).
the author of the PR is busy at the time he receives the comments on his PR. (Solution: DM message)
the author didn't get notified when his PR contains a merge conflict. (Solution: DM message)
the author didn't get notified when the pipeline fails. (Solution: DM message)
I forgot to mention that I've also had problems with Atlassian email notifications for years too... For some reason their email notifications are trash and extremely unreliable. Alternatively, I've been using Github now for a while and I always get the notifications and that problem is now solved.
Anyways, your idea is worth a shot! Let us know how it works.
I can say im experiencing the same issues with their emails and i'm looking to build something that will help developers to overcome this thank you a lot 🙏🏻