Why your team doesn’t need to use pull requests

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Style Pass

2024-09-25 01:00:10

02 January 2021 6 minute read

Github introduced the pull request practice, and features to support it, to make it easier for people who run open-source projects to accept contributions from outside their group of trusted committers.

Committers are trusted to make changes to the codebase routinely. But a change from a random outsider needs to be assessed to make sure it works, doesn’t take the project in an unwanted direction, and meets the standards for style and quality. The outsider packages their proposed change as a pull request, which a committer can easily review and manage as a unit before merging it into the codebase.

Although designed to make it easier to accept contributions from untrusted people outside a team, many teams now use pull requests for people inside their own team. This practice has become so common that many people consider it a default, “best” practice. Some people assume there is no other way to make sure code is reviewed because they’ve never seen anything else.