A presentation I gave to the 2014 Yow! West conference about pull requests on 13 May 2014.
The talk itself is published on YouTube and I have also published a practice run of my talk on YouTube.
The talk is based on a blog post that I wrote.
Developers who are familiar with open source will likely be aware of pull requests, which were created and popularised by GitHub as a way of providing some automation, visibility and social interaction around merging software changes. What is less talked about is the use of pull requests for commercial/private/proprietary software development, which not only yields the same advantages as with open source development, but also a lot more.
In my experiences so far I’ve found that the single most effective change I have introduced to a software team that has improved the quality of software output is to introduce pull requests. It also has a positive effect on other things like improved collaboration and collective code ownership.
This talk will take a deep-dive into pull requests and explore advantages, gotchas, integrating with a continuous delivery workflow, a range of tips based on my experience so far using them on open source and commercial projects and some tips on how to get started.