Sep 28, 2022
If your Pull Request is staying open for too long due to missing reviews, you are falling into the danger of long-living branches causing merge conflicts, context switches etc.
Ship, Show, Ask is a modern branching strategy that lets you combine advantages of Pull Requests with the ability to ship changes fast.
Here's how it works:
1. Ship
"You want to make a change, so you make it directly on your mainline." When you do this, you’re not waiting for anyone to take your change to production. You’re not asking for a code review.
2. Show
"You make your change on a branch, you open a Pull Request, then you merge it without waiting for anyone. You’ll want to wait for your automated checks (tests, code coverage, preview environments, etc.), but you don’t wait for anyone’s feedback to proceed with taking your change live."
3. Ask
"Here we pause. We make our changes on a branch, we open a Pull Request, and we wait for feedback before merging."
Our recommendation to speed up your Pull Requests, which worked for us:
We use Show for PRs with proven changes where we have little doubt that it causes problems:
- Fixed vulnerable OSS dependency version,
- Updated documentation, typo and spelling fixes
- Small Changes we already discussed, like changing a setting
Meantime we still run the CI pipeline and to get notified our colleagues so they can have a look later. To mark a Pull Request as a Show Pull Request, we add [SHOW] as a prefix to the pull request title so that everybody sees the intention of the PR. These pull requests are automatically merged by our in-house developed tool DevSensei.
If we are unsure and need the feedback of our colleagues to continue, we use Ask: e.g. when we implement a large new feature, and do an initial WIP PR with a prototype to get feedback (still important to reach out early to colleagues).
If you would like to try it, it's available on Atlassian Marketplace
