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The Downsides of Pull Requests and How to Improve them
How a pull request can be more than simply reading code
Pull requests have been around for a while now. As part of the agile process, they aim to reduce code smell, get opinions from other developers and keep the codebase consistent.
This is, of course, purely utopic. In reality, PR’s are big chunks of code that you are going to scroll through to look for mistakes.
The Downsides of Pull Requests
Lack of context
The main issue with a PR is the total lack of context. Most of the time, your pull request tool is going to show you the bits of code that changed and hide the unchanged lines. This hiding is removing the context that you need to have a full overview of the code.
You can of course see this hidden code, but it’s usually not that easy to read and tends to make it more confusing than it should be.
In the end, you can still detect code smell and bad practices, but you are not really able to tell if the code is going to work well! And this can be a way for bugs to be pushed.
