Engineering's hidden bottleneck: pull requests

The Stack Overflow Podcast

With companies taking a long look at developer experience, it’s time to turn that attention on the humble pull request. The folks at LinearB took a look at a million PRs — four million review cycles involving around 25,000 developers — and found that it takes about five days to get through a review and merge the code. CI/CD has done wonders getting deployments down to a day or less; maybe it’s time for continuous merge next.

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with COO Dan Lines and CEO Ori Keren, co-founders of LinearB, about why PRs are the chokepoint in the software development lifecycle, uncovering and automating the hidden rules of review requests, and their free tool, gitStream, that’ll find the right reviewer for your PR right now.

Episode notes:

So why do reviews take so long? Context switches, team leads who review everything, and the bystander effect are top contenders.

Dan and Ori hope their gitStream tool can reduce the time PRs take by automating a lot of the hidden rules for reviews. Check it out at gitstream.cm or linearb.io/dev.

Dan Lines hosts his own podcast: Dev Interrupted. Check out this episode with Stack Overflow’s very own Ben Matthews.

Connect with Dan Lines and Ori Keren on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Rudy Velthuis for throwing a Lifeboat to the question Why should EDX be 0 before using the DIV instruction?