Today, I’m excited to announce that Seeq has released the the pr-reminders bot as an open source project! This bot integrates with GitHub and Slack to remind software engineering teams that there is code ready and waiting for review.
Below is a (redacted) screenshot of the bot in action – it can be configured to show pull requests awaiting review, lacking recent activity (“sleeping”), or lacking a primary reviewer (assigning a primary reviewer is a convention we follow at Seeq).
The pr-reminders bot was born from an issue that we perceived on some of our squads at Seeq. Namely, that code would be put up for review and then neglected. We tried several improvements to our process – which we recommend later – before realizing that sometimes a simple reminder that code was still waiting for review was just what was needed. We have found that these simple reminders help a great deal. Code is reviewed more promptly and pull requests aren’t left forgotten until the author reminds someone to perform a review.
So when should you consider using pr-reminders? Firstly, if you’re not doing code review on your team, I highly recommend you consider starting the practice. There is good evidence for its benefits, which I have written about elsewhere. Then if you are having trouble obtaining timely reviews, before resorting to a bot, we recommend trying other things like talking to your team about the relative priority of code review, reducing the size of your pull requests, using built-in GitHub notifications, etc. We did all that prior to implementing this bot, but we have found pr-reminders to be a helpful backstop.
Several teams at Seeq have used this bot to make sure that code is reviewed in a timely manner. To start with the bot, you’ll want to take a look at the the README for instructions on deployment and configuration. You may also be interested in the Helm chart if you have a Kubernetes cluster to deploy pr-reminders to (our preferred method of deploying the bot).
Since pr-reminders is an open source project, we welcome and encourage contributions. Again, you’ll want to check out the README if you’re interested in getting involved. Hope to see you there!