Having a Healthy Pull Request Process for Teams

This resource first appeared in issue #73 on 07 May 2021 and has tags Technical Leadership: Software Development, Technical Leadership: Code Reviews

Having a Healthy Pull Request Process for Teams - Alex Kitchens

This is a longer read on setting up a pull request process, both for the authors of the PR and the reviewers. Other processes could be healthy too, but any healthy process will have clear and explicit expectations.

Kitchens spells out the responsibilities for an author - they fall under making PRs easier to review:

Make the PR Description Clear and Digestible
Explain Unexpected Changes
Keep the Size of Pull Requests Small (When Possible)
Make Sure the Team Knows the Problem Before Opening a PR to Address It
Listen to and Take in the Feedback Received on PRs

and for reviewers, under making the process easier for and thus unblocking the author:

Give an Explicit Approval/Disapproval with Explicit Reasons
- When Not Approving, Distinguish Which Comments are Blocking
- Express full thoughts rather than shortening sentences
Know When to Reach Out

There are good sidebars there on some possible approaches to “chunking” larger PRs, and examples of what is discussed.

Kitchens suggestion for explicit blocking or nonblocking comments, sounds sort of like Netlify’s boulder-to-pebble spectrum for comments we discussed way back in #15.