Fact: The state of pull requests is broken and we finally have the data to prove it. In our latest LinearB Labs episode we reveal the information that has led us to the inevitable conclusion that pull requests have become a massive source of toil, bottlenecks and a huge barrier to shipping.

Better yet, two people who have been thinking about how to attack this dev workflow issue – Dan Lines and Ori Keren of LinearB – are ready to actually propose a solution: continuous merge.

The next step in CI/CD, continuous merge is the concept of creating lanes where pull requests can be merged based on their risk. Plain and simple, pull requests should not all be treated the same.

The first step in continuous merge proposed in the episode is the dev tool gitStream, which automates and optimizes merging pull requests based on risk and level of attention required.

A game-changing conversation, this episode is the first time you might hear about continuous merge but it certainly won’t be the last.

Episode Highlights Include:

  • (3:10) A history of CI/CD
  • (10:15) The #1 undiagnosed problem in developer experience
  • (15:00) What's happening industry-wide in VSM
  • (18:32) Giving devs a better tool: Continuous Merge
  • (24:09) Not all PRs should be treated the same
  • (28:21)  75-80% of all PRs have no changes being made 
  • (34:40) What is gitStream?
Want to cut code-review time by up to 40%? Add estimated review time to pull requests automatically!

gitStream is the free dev tool from LinearB that eliminates the No. 1 bottleneck in your team’s workflow: pull requests and code reviews. After reviewing the work of 2,000 dev teams, LinearB’s engineers and data scientists found that pickup times and code review were lasting 4 to 5 days longer than they should be. 

The good news is that they found these delays could be eliminated largely by adding estimated review time to pull requests!

Learn more about how gitStream is making coding better HERE.

Setup gitStream on your GitHub repo today