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Over the years I've experimented with getting rid of pull requests quite a few times. As a whole and solely as an abstract idea I wholeheartedly agree with the article. Code Review is not the same as a pull request. With that said, despite advocating at points for pair programming, mobbing, incremental reviews and having worked on a variety of different systems, and having success with some of them, I keep ending up back with PR's for the majority of places I've worked. The reason why, I think, is one of cognitive load. Pull requests are easy. I don't think they're the best approach to code review ( big PR's often don't get reviewed effectively, and being an effective PR reviewer is a hard skill ) but, it's a good fallback. Everyone knows what a pull request is, the tooling for supporting them is excellent and it requires the least upfront work to get a code review. With that said, I would highly encourage folk to look at different ways of reviewing code. I don't think many people will fully replace Pull Requests with a solely straight to master development approach utilising non-pr code review styles, but, having the alternatives in your box of tools for specific situations is really powerful. However, I don't see pull requests going away because, if nothing else, they're an easy, low cognitive load approach for having a second set of eyes on some code. |