Streamline Code Review Process with gitStream

Working code review process is a cornerstone of a modern software development. Developers should not push their changes directly into test or production environment without proper code review by another developer. The problem with code review is, that they create a tollgate for developers which slows down the code deployment process. Usually other developers are busy with their own work and they don’t have time to immediately review the code change, so the code reviews starts easily stockpile. This leads into longer feedback loop, which again increases the frustration and decreases motivation. Short feedback loop is a critical part of DevOps practices, so we need to always look for things that are causing waiting.

Reduce Code Review Wait Time

gitStream (which is free tool for GitHub) tries to solve the waiting issue with three different ways:

1. By providing context to pull requests, so that they are easier to be picked up
2. Showing pull request size information, so that small changes are more likely to be reviewed fast
3. Streamlining low risk pull requests.

All of these are create improvements into review process and they will reduce the wait time of small and simple pull requests. The more complex ones might still stay in queue for a long time, but there are some ways to speed them up.

The whole idea behind gitStream is to create rules for bot, that will tag, assign and provide more information about the reviewed code. Rules for bot are defined in YAML files, which are stored in GitHub repo. I will write more detailed blog post, that goes through the setup and configuration process later. If you would like to gain more information about the gitStream now, check out their website at https://linearb.io/dev/gitstream/.