It seems like every team I’ve worked with in the past few years follows some form of GitFlow. At the very least, they use feature branches and pull requests to perform code reviews.

How we got here

The creation of distributed source control systems made the pull request model possible. Distributed source control systems emerged from the open source community, where there is typically a group of independent people working on a shared system and there is a need for trusted reviewers to gate changes to the code. With previous tools like CVS or Subversion, the cost of accepting a contribution to open source projects was high. Unless the author was already a trusted contributor, it usually involved submitting a patch.

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Context is king

I view code as the end result of a series of decisions made by the code’s author. When the author was writing the code, they likely evaluated a series of approaches, tried a few of them, and found one to be the best solution to the problem. The final code can’t possibly capture the all decisions that were made or all of the trade-offs that were considered, though.

I was using Subversion for version control for Booked for many years. When other people had changes they wanted to contribute I asked them to commit directly to trunk or to create a branch. I’d often have to revert commits or make non-trivial changes to ensure the commit didn’t break the application. I moved to Git a couple of years back and being able to review/accept pull requests has certainly made it easier to incorporate contributions to the source from external developers.

Unfortunately, I still don’t have the author’s context which led to the decision to change or write a certain line of code. Collaboration tools make the discussion easier by being able to point to specific changes. Pull requests certainly enable a technically simpler process for accepting changes to the source, but they do not provide any other benefits over methods like patch submission.

Wait, what are we doing?

Using pull requests on a team all working on the same project is so strange to me. It’s a process designed for highly-distributed, loosely-coupled developers to contribute to the same codebase. If the team is co-located, there is no physical separation that forces an asynchronous process. There is very rarely a risk of a change being submitted that isn’t part of an agreed upon team strategy.

Yet, I see pull request comments and iterations of changes fly back and forth over the course of hours, days, or even weeks. Often, the resulting changes only take a few hours of hands-on work in culmination, but take orders of magnitude longer due to the asynchronous nature of the pull request process. During each passing minute the author’s memory of their decision making process fades. This is compounded if the author moves on to work on something new – but work in progress abuse is a topic for another blog post.

At my first real job in the early 2000s we did side by side code reviews. I would sit down with another developer (there was only one other person, so I guess I should say that I’d sit down with THE other developer) and talk through the changes I made to enable a new feature.

Unless the review was happening within a few minutes of finishing the feature, it’s very likely that I didn’t remember the specific context which led to the decision to write a specific line of code. Side by side code reviews encourage discussion and are a drastic improvement over pull requests, but I think we can do better.

We can do better

The most productive team I’ve ever been a part of adopted pair-programming for all production code. Two people, two monitors, two keyboards, one computer. There is no way to lose the context of each line of code being written when practicing pair-programming. This is a real-time collaborative decision making and code review process.

Our team had no need for a separate review step, because we already had the multiplicative brain power of two people involved in the creation of the code. Even without the “formal” review and merge process, we had incredibly high quality with almost zero knowledge gaps throughout the team.

One more gripe, that’s it, I promise

Here’s my last gripe with code reviews and pull requests as commonly practiced – they defer continuous integration.

Continuous integration is the process of continually integrating the whole team’s set of changes at a regular cadence. The purpose is simple – regularly integrating, compiling, and testing outstanding changes minimizes the time between the code working on one person’s machine and validation that it works once combined with the rest of the team’s changes.

Pull requests (more specifically feature branches, I suppose) defer integration. Sure, if you’re a diligent developer you may pull master into your branch a few times a day. But since everyone on the team is committing to their own branch, master is missing the majority of the outstanding changes and full integration is being deferred.

When I talk to teams about this, I regularly hear the opinion that it’s a good thing.

There is an impression that feature branching and pull requests help keep master stable. I agree with the spirit of this approach. I agree with always-releaseable code. But let’s be honest, if a team can’t keep trunk stable, why would maintaining X number of branches will be stable?

Branches are a security blanket. Sure, they make you feel safe, but provide little to actually provide safety. It’s just an illusion.

Always-releasable doesn’t mean change should be avoided or isolated. While it is true that not changing the code is the easiest way to keep it from breaking, building up large batches of changes that all get merged once “complete” is far more risky than committing small changes to a single branch daily. When the time between writing a line of code and knowing if it causes unexpected issues is short, it becomes very simple to identify and correct it.

Issues have nowhere to hide in a small change set.

The sales pitch

So I guess my pitch here is to try different approaches.

Try trunk based development as an alternative to feature branches. Try pair-programming as an alternative to pull requests.

If you’re absolutely not going to budge from feature branches, impose a rule that a branch cannot live longer than 24 hours. If you’re absolutely not going to budge from pull requests, impose a rule that all reviews must be complete within a few hours.

Tighten the feedback loop and see what good comes from it.

These things may not be for every team, but it may work for your team.

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