Ship / Show / Ask - Rouan Wilsenach

This resource first appeared in issue #93 on 24 Sep 2021 and has tags Technical Leadership: Code Reviews, Technical Leadership: Software Development, Managing A Team: Other

We’ve talked about pre-commit vs post-commit reviews in #34 - post-commit being something of an alternative to PR review. Changes that past CI testing get committed, so that developers aren’t blocked by waiting for review, and commits are reviewed later. (Obviously this incentivizes a large test suite!)

Wilsenach suggests that you don’t have to have a culture where it’s either/or. In the “Ship/Show/Ask” model, changes can be simply made without review (Ship) or post-commit review (or at least communication) happens for changes (Show) or pre-commit review happens (Ask), depending on the situation.

In practice, most of the research software development teams that I’ve seen have a “mostly-Ask” culture, but even there, we usually do in practice have an Ship/Ask model - no one requires PR approvals for fixing typos in documentations or the like. Would it be beneficial to extend the boundaries of what is permissible to “just Ship”? With “Show” for bigger changes that one things it would be useful to communicate?

What do your teams do in terms of review - pre, post, a mix?