Using tools like GitHub or BitBucket allow developers to able to submit their changes through pull requests. One of the challenges with pull requests is that they often contain very little information, apart from the change itself and perhaps the issue or case in question. Bad pull requests make the lives of reviewers a lot harder, and mean they need to spend a lot of time understanding the context. Instead of focusing on the change itself.<\/p>\n
So, how can you improve your pull requests? Duretti<\/a> and Mark<\/a>\u00a0from Slack Engineering<\/a> suggest that we add more empathy to pull requests <\/a>to make them easier for the authors and reviewers alike.<\/p>\n Duretti<\/a> and Mark<\/a>\u00a0use\u00a0Dr Bren\u00e9 Browns definition of empathy:<\/p>\n Four Components of Empathy, by Dr. Bren\u00e9 Brown<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Empathy is a skill that we have to learn and practice\u200a\u2014\u200amastery comes from practice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n It’s so important to realise that in an asynchronous flow like pull requests, the reviewer(s) often lack a lot of the context that the author has while attempting to fix an issue. They go on to say:<\/p>\n Basically, your reviewer is totally missing context<\/em>, and it is your pull request’s job to give them that context. You have a few options:<\/p>\n The premise of this article is that there is a completely asynchronous workflow between the author and review of the code. This probably means they don’t speak\u00a0together on a regular basis. This is quite common in distributed teams or teams with very clearly defined roles.<\/p>\n Writing a pull request with the reviewers context in mind is a wonderful way to ease the effort needed to actually get started with reviewing the code at hand. These steps to improving pull requests\u00a0make a lot of sense, but should be used on a case by case basis.<\/p>\nEmpathy<\/h2>\n
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Improving\u00a0Pull Requests<\/h2>\n
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My thoughts<\/h2>\n
Thanks for reading! \ud83d\ude42 If you enjoyed it, share it with a friend!<\/h3>\n
For more thoughts and examples on empathy in pull requests, check out this video<\/a> where I dig deeper into the suggestions from this article.<\/h4>\n