

GITUP REVIEW HOW TO
How to Do Code Reviews on GitHub the Right Wayĭo you know how a code review on GitHub works? How do you do it the right way? Improve your code quality and developer workflow with smaller pull requests.

With automated notifications, metrics, dashboards, and progress tracking, LinearB to help your teams’ keep pull request sizes small or ensure that they’re being thorough as they review requests. Pairing GitHub with LinearB equips you with a powerful system that will be the basis for a successful code review process. GitHub’s UI offers great features to facilitate code review, allowing the reviewer to compare diffs, leave comments on specific lines, and even suggest code changes on the spot. You can rely on code review tools designed to make the process easier and more effective. Thankfully, you don’t have to create and execute on a pull request process all on your own. Since both sides know what to expect, there’s less rework and less time wasted. Having a standardized pull request process makes the lives easier for both reviewer and reviewee. Paradoxically, speeding up development time also improves the quality of the shipped code! This is what LinearB’s CEO calls “the Bicycle Syndrome.” The rule of thumb is: Smaller pull requests and more pull request merges over larger pull requests and fewer merges. Small pull requests make it easier for the reviewer to review the code, which reduces the time it takes for the pull request to be picked up and completed.
GITUP REVIEW SOFTWARE
Speed is paramount, especially in a continuous integration/continuous software development paradigm. Having pull requests on GitHub just for “auditing” purposes and merging them immediately afterĪ Good Pull Request Process Makes Your Code Review Betterįinally, since we do recommend you perform your code reviews during pull requests, it’s essential you understand the importance of a great pull request process.Performing code reviews even without using Git-in a previous job, we used Team Foundation Version Control and a Visual Studio plugin so we could have code reviews.Using pair programming as a replacement for reviews-in my opinion, they don’t really substitute, but that’s another conversation.Merging pull requests without review and then reviewing the code afterward.You could try using neither, but we definitely don’t recommend that.įor instance, the following patterns are all possible: It’s possible to use one or the other, or use both together-which we recommend.

Sure, these two processes are related, but they’re not the same. With the importance of code reviews out of our way, there’s another point we need to discuss: the differences between a code review and a pull request. This especially important in a remote setting, where face-to-face knowledge transmission isn’t possible. Through frequent code reviews, engineers can learn about different areas of the code, which helps their team achieve true collective code ownership, thus reducing their bus factor. We do have another post on what code reviews are and why they matter as well as a post on what you need (and don’t need) in your code review checklist, both of which you should check it out.īesides improving code quality, peer reviews also have another great advantage: they help knowledge to spread among team members. When it comes to improving the quality of a codebase and reducing technical debt, there’s probably no technique more effective than code reviews-with automated testing being the honorable exception. Fix Your Pull Requests and Reap the Benefitsīefore exploring the anatomy of a GitHub code review, let’s walk through some basics first.How to Do Code Reviews on GitHub the Right Way.Code Review on GitHub: The Fundamentals.

Then, we’ll walk you through how the code review process works on GitHub, sharing tips on how to do it the best way.īefore wrapping up, we’ll share some final thoughts and tips. We’ll start with some fundamentals, briefly covering the importance of code reviews and how they relate to GitHub pull requests. That’s what this post is about: the right way to do a code review on GitHub. That’s why performing-or receiving-a code review on GitHub is part of the daily lives of many software engineers. GitHub was launched in 2008 and since then has become a massively popular platform for hosting source code, both for private and open-source projects.
