The Scene
Working in a teams is difficult. Working with remote teams is even more difficult.
Especially, when you have a high througput team, who zooms through tickets.
Often, a list of MRs will just for and you wonder to yourself, “hmm, perhaps i can review one or two of these MRs in my downtime”.
Because forgotten MRs are dead MRs
Of course, knowing the state of a MR is the responsible developer’s sole concern. And really, only the developer responsible for the MR REALLY knows its actual state.
Thus, we are lead to the path of fear and doubt for a reviewing developer. This of course, slows velocity and results in developer paralysis.
Doubt leads to fear, fear leads to walking away and going to play with lightsabers.
A strategy that works really well is as follows:
- When you create a new branch, create the PR right away! Then mark that PR as
[WIP] JIRA-1234 - what i am doing - AS you near the end of that ticket, you change the title to
[REVIEW] JIRA-1234 - what i am doing
Doing it like this ensures:
- any free-range-devs looking for something to do, can right away see the status of MR
- the associated ticket
- and a brief summary of what the MR does.
Dont
- Dont simply remove the tag
JIRA-1234 - what i am doing- as a dev who wants to review, is this MR ready for review? did they forget to add the tag whats the status (self defeating)