Ask HN: Have you found a good workflow for reviewing PRs on GitHub?

[soenkeliebau]

I am beginning to despair. I can't even really put my finger on what exactly it is, but I find reviewing PRs on github extremely painful. For example, I keep missing my own comments when checking back if the author addressed them. Why is there no list of "all my comments"? Maybe filterable by outdated,resolved and open..

[codeapprove]

I’m building a much better tool for reviewing code on GitHub. Still in early stages and looking for feedback, but our central idea is exactly what you mention. We make sure that all comments are resolved before the review is done and help you focus on what needs resolution.

Check out https://codeapprove.com or just email me at [e-mail] if you’re interested

[soenkeliebau]

That sounds interesting, I'd love to have a closer look at that, or get a demo, whatever you can currently offer :)

[codeapprove]

Yep can do a demo or even just get you set up to explore. Send me an email (sam at habosa dot com) and I’ll find a time for us to chat.

[naivebull]

I do code review on both Gitlab and Github and found the experience on Github more pleasant. Things that help:

- Keep the PR small, the code changes focused.

- The “viewed” checkbox per file. Tick it as the file is reviewed. If the file is changed later, it will expand as “Changed since last viewed”. If not, one less thing to check on next review iteration.

- Keep discussions off Github. There should be one comment per issue as the initializer as well as reminder. The long discussions goes into a Slack thread.

- The reviewer is the one to resolve the comment. This way, you can resolve them as in “tick them off” as done.

[soenkeliebau]

Thanks! That last one is probably the most important one as that mostly makes my comments "disappear" I think.. Regarding discussions on Slack, since our product is open source we would ideally like to keep discussions somewhere viewable and related to the code changes so that people can see what was discussed later on. It is a bit hard to find that on Slack, or do you have some form of "system" for tagging discussions in there?

[piotrkaminski]

<plug> You might want to check out Reviewable (https://reviewable.io) if you haven't yet. It addresses your complaints about comments on GitHub and many more besides, while remaining as integrated with GitHub as feasible. Some pretty large open source organizations are using it, e.g. CockroachDB. </plug>