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The advantages of large, long-running pull requests – by DHH

• adrianomartins 5y ago
  It's interesting to see a high profile like DHH defending pull requests, let alone long-running pull requests. It seems that these days everybody likes to hate pull requests for all the (huge) downsides, but rarely we see devs praising the (even huger) benefits of pull requests. I think the problem is that these huge benefits only shine when pull requests are used properly.
  • adastra22 5y ago
    What’s the alternative? Serious question: I’ve never heard of anyone “hating on pull requests.”
    • adrianomartins 5y ago
      Most folks will tell you to do pair/mob programming, or simply trunk-based development without any peer review whatsoever. I've found from the teams I've been in touch with that, unless you do 100.00% pair/mob programming or 100.00% feature flagging (which both have their own fair share of downsides), you'll probably have to use pull requests strategically, with a clear purpose, and that's great because they're there for a reason. The problem arises when team use pull requests by default, dragging everybody down even when the changes are quite simple, and disincentivizing small, unrelated changes that would require yet another pull request to submit them.
      • adastra22 5y ago
        I work mostly on open source projects so perhaps that colors my view, but every project I work on uses 100% pull requests for everything. Pushing directly to the repo is disabled. It is interesting to hear there is a more diverse spectrum of opinions on this.